ri SOUL OF NAFOIIO 




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THE SOUL OF NAPOLEON 







'lioto^raJ>h : Grant 



THE REAL NAPOLEON 

From an engraving by Vigneiix 



THE SOUL OF 

NAPOLEON 



BY 



HAMIL GRANT 

AUTHOR OF " SPIES AND SECRET 
SERVICE"; EDITOR OF "THE LAST 
DAYS OF THE ARCHDUKE RUDOLPH" 



PHILADELPHIA 

GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 






0^ 






PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVIERSIDE PfcESS LIMITED 
EDINBURGH 



NOTE ON THE GABRIELLI PORTRAIT 
OF NAPOLEON 

We invite the reader^s attention to the so-called 
Gdbrielli portrait of Napoleon, executed by Vigneux, 
and here presented as ayrontispiece. This portrait 
was emphatically declared by the relatives of the 
Corsican — including the Emperofs mother, his 
sisters, and his uncle, Cardinal Fesch — to have been 
the only one which bore anything like a truthful 
resemblance to their august kinsman. Prince 
Gabrielli, its original owner, and a distinguished 
contemporary and visitor of Napoleon, attached 
great value to the work on this account. As will be 
seen, it bears small resemblance to accepted portraits 
of the Emperor. 

The 7najority of the artists who have transmitted 
to us the traditional face of the Conqueror — ascetic, 
severe and somewhat scowling — sought, it would 
seem, to flatter Napoleon, regarding whose early 
Classical obsession they were fully informed, by 
giving to portraits of their illustrious sitter those 
attributes of feature and expression with which 
sculptors represent Romans of the heroic age. The 
portrait by Vigneux dates from 1807, when Napoleon 
had well outgrown his worship of Antiquity. 
Genius, we may be certain, in any case, has no 
specific facial type, 

H. G. 



"Le plus bel eloge de cet homme 
extraordinaire c'est que chacun 
veut en parler, et que tous ceux 
qui en parlent, n'importe comment, 
croient de s'agrandir." 

POZZO DI BORGO. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAOH 

The Genesis of Napoleon . . .17 

The Rule of Heredity — Man the Supersimian — Role of the 
Spinal Column — A Cynical Truism — Napoleon's Splendid 
Equipment — Lord Acton's View — Social Origins of the 
Bonapartes — Their Middle-class Status — The Nursery of 
Fame — Corsica and its Natives — Napoleon' s^^ Regard for 
his Island Home — Bonaparte's Ligurian Ancestry — King 
Theodore of Corsica — His Relationship to the Bonapartes — 
Paoli and Bonaparte pire — The Bonapartes as Men of Law 
— A Lawyer's Importance in Ajaccio — Ancestral Preten- 
sions of Bonaparte phe — Phenomenal Types and New 
Blood — Factions of the Mala and Buona Parte — Ajaccio 
and Napoleon's Ancestors — The Aristocrats of the Pale — 
The Provincialism of the Bonapartes — Their Love of 
Learning — Their Esprit de Foyer — The Spirit of the Clan 
— Napoleon's Mania of Superiority — His Jealousy of 
Famous Men — His Opinion about Ccesar, Hannibal, 
Alexander — Relations with his Master Generals — Le Harnai's 
Militaire — Napoleon's Master Passion 



CHAPTER II 

The Imperial Student . . . .49 

Napoleon's Academic Training — The Curriculum at 
Brienne — The Classical and Language Course — On Literary 
Style — The Mathematical Studies — Religious Instruction — 
At the Ecole Militaire — The Subaltern-Student of Auxonne 
— Importance of History — Formation of Literary Tastes — 
What Rousseau taught Napoleon — Machiavelli a Favourite 
— Was Bonaparte a Mason? — Some Literary Attempts — 
His " Heart's Library " — Some English Books 

CHAPTER III 

The Imperial Critic . . . .61 

Frenchmen and Corneille — Value of Napoleon's Criticism — 
His Literary Likes and Dislikes— His Opinion of Corneille 
and Moli^re — A Discussion of Tragedy — Napoleon and 
Raynouard — Concerning Voltaire — A Reading by Talma — 
Napoleon and the Public Taste— Love and Tragedy— A 
Literary Ghost — The Emperor's Criticism of the Mneid, Book 
1 1. —His Opinion of the Iliad— Dislike of Shakespeare— 
A Hypercritical View 



10 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IV 

PAGE 

The Imperial Theatre . . . .75 

Talma and Bonaparte — The Actor coaches the First Consul 
— The Emperor coaches the Actor — Friendly Relations of the 
Twain — Napoleon on Critics and his Love for Cinna — 
Concerning Mademoiselle Mars and her Sister — An Un- 
expected Scene — Mademoiselle Bourgoin and Chaptal — An 
Imperial Rebuke 

CHAPTER V 

Mademoiselle George . . . .87 

Standards of Beauty — Lessing's View — George an Ama- 
zonian Type — Her Attraction for Bonaparte — Their First 
Meeting at Saint-Cloud — Affected Nervousness of the 
Actress — Napoleon as a Lover — Espionage of Talleyrand — 
Bonaparte criticises the Actress — His Generosity to George 
— A Visit to the Tuileries — Josephine's Fit of Jealousy 
— Napoleon's Coronation — George visits an Emperor — 
Napoleon and his Bonnes Fortunes — Where George dis- 
appointed her Lover — Her Veneration for Napoleon — A 
Costly Rendezvous 

CHAPTER VI 

Napoleon and Weimar . . . .105 

The Cult of Napoleon — Goethe on the Corsican — The 
Congress of Erfurt — Honouring the Sage — Lannes, Maret 
and Goethe — Presentation to the Emperor — Ecce Homo ! — 
The Emperor and Werther — Politics and Fate — Napoleon's 
Manoeuvre — MUller on the Interview — Talleyrand's Version 
of the Meeting — Preparations for Erfurt — An Imperial 
Opinion upon Athalie — Goethe and Dedication — Talleyrand 
on Napoleon's Learning — Johann von MUller — The 
Emperor on Christianity — Tragedy, the School of Kings — 
Wieland is presented — Les genres tranches — History and 
Romance — Wieland at the Palace — Tacitus and the Annals 
— Napoleon's Opinion — Wieland' s Eloquence — The Great 
Painter of Antiquity — Livy and Tacitus — The World's 
Happiest Age ? 

CHAPTER VII 

The Imperial Art-Patron . . . 129 

A Specious Sentiment — Art, Merit, and the Napoleonic 
Cult — The Corsican's Native Materialism — A Political 
Momcment — Artists a "Waspish Lot" — Art to Order — 
Feeding the Fraternity — Economy in Public Architecture — 



CONTENTS 11 

PAGE 

Chapter VII. — contd. 

A Napoleonic Art — The Emperor's Dislike of Architects — 
Some Prices paid to Famous Artists — The Corsican a Con- 
noisseur without Pretensions — Insistence on the Napoleonic 
Legend — How to hurt Englishmen — The Imperial Reclame 
— Napoleon's Art Collection at La Malmaison — A List of 
Pictures 

CHAPTER VIII 
David, the Imperial Painter . . 141 

David in 1797 — His Meeting with Bonaparte — A Visit to 
the Atelier — A Soldier's Bhmt Criticism — " These Military 
Philistines " — David's Promotion — Bonaparte crossing the 
Alps — David and his School — A Lover of the Limelight — 
David and the Coronation — A Painter's Whole Ambition — 
Gerard and the Coronation Picture — A Happy Suggestion 
— Pauline Bonaparte and Gerard — Napoleon's Satisfactio7i 
— David and the Legion — The Douglas Portrait of the 
Emperor — David and the Peerage 

CHAPTER IX 

Canova and Napoleon . . .157 

Canova a Great Philanthropic Spirit — Bonaparte and the 
Sculptor — Canova' s Independence — The Condition of Rome 
— Modelling the First Consul — Napoleon as a Sculptor's 
Subject — An Heroic Statue of the Corsican — Mars and 
Venus — The Ingenue Pauline — A Chats worth Treasure — 
Canova and the French Capital — A Bust af Marie Louise 
— The Farnese Hercules — The Pope's Art Patronage — The 
Borghese Marbles — The Sculptor's Style — Napoleon and 
Rome — The Corsican's Cautiousness — Art and Religion 
— Protestants and Catholics — Arrogance of the Priests — 
Napoleon on Ccssar — " The Great Man of the Great People " 
— The Corsican and the Pope — Canova' s Advice to the 
Emperor — Oligarchic Venice — A Candid Admission — The 
Day of Wagram — Canova and Marriage — Monsieur de 
Bouclon's Canonisation 

CHAPTER X 

The Imperial Musician . . . .179 

Napoleon on Music — Italian Musicians versus German — 
National Value of Opera — Napoleon no Musician — His 
Plans for the Musical Art — The Eroica Symphony of 
Beethoven — Salaries of Official Singers— A Surprise for 
Vatican Celibates — La Belle Grassini — The Southern 
Temperament — Grassini' s Disobedience — Proud Monsieur 
Paer — Grassini, Wellington and Napoleon — An Intellectual 
Singer 



12 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XI 

PAGE 

Religion of Napoleon . . . .189 

Modern Views of Religiosity — Newman and Manning — 
Men and the Atheistic View — Napoleon after the Egyptian 
Campaign — Real Value of Religion — The Corsican's 
Essential Unbelief — " An Instinct of Spiritualism " — A 
Sound German View — The Chevalier de Beauterne — A 
Napoleonic Press-Agent — The Napoleonic Expression — 
Man's Simian Disposition — " Christ is no Man " — Beau- 
terne's Puerilities — Cardinal Fesch on his Nephew — 
Religion postulates a Calvary — Monsieur de Norvins — 
Napoleon's Mind too positive for Belief— His Taste for 
Religious Discussion — The Murder ofEnghien — Napoleon's 
Cynical Explanation — His Choice of National Religious — 
His Political Horror of Atheists 

CHAPTER XII 

The Imperial Educationist . , . 205 

Action, the Royal Quality in Man — The Necessity of 
Religious Training — Dislike of Precocity in Children — 
Geography and History essential in Early Years — Linguistic 
Talent no Test of Mentality — Are the Classics valuable? 
"Bending the Mind to Labour" — Value of Geometrical 
Studies — The Age of Puberty and its Mystic Revolutions — 
The Imperial Catechism — Monsieur de Portalis, imperio- 
maniac — Napoleon and God — Some Questions and Answers 
— Contempt for Ordinary Intelligence — Cardinal Caprara's 
Rdle — Napoleon and his Opportunity — The Super-Caligula 

CHAPTER XIII 

Napoleon and Journalism . . . 217 

The Press after Brumaire — Difference between French and 
English Journalism — Wholesale Suppression of Sheets — 
Liberty of the Press ceases — Newspaper Morality — 
Napoleon's Journalistic Prdcis — Monsieur Fidvde, Chief 
Censor — Le Moniteur becomes Official Organ — Napoleon's 
Private Paper — Value of Official Organs — Government's 
Duty to the Nation — Lucus a non Lucendo — A Newspaper 
without News — Monsieur Suard, Editor — Le Journal des 
Ddbats — Napoleon and Fractious Editors— Le Mercure de 
France — Monsieur de Chateaitbriand — Napoleon's own 
Press Agency — Beugnot and the Emperor — Les Ideologues 
— La Route d'Antibes — The Adaptable Sub-Editor — The 



CONTENTS 13 

Chapter XIII. — contd, 

PAGE 

Hundred Days — Napoleon's Opinion of the Press — Caustic 
Remarks on Journalists and. Writers — His Earliest Venture 
as a Newspaper-Owner — The Courrier de I'Armee — 
Napoleon's Personal Corps of Special Correspondents 

CHAPTER XIV 

Bonaparte versus De Stael . . . 233 

Bonaparte attracts de Stael — Bonaparte' s Natural Antipathy 
for Corinne — Augereau and Madame — Chez M. de Talley- 
rand — Constant and Corinne — Benjamin's Little In- 
advertence — De Stael and hey Spokesman — Intrigues against 
Bonaparte — High Political Ambitions — Vne Femme in- 
compvise — Her Work on Literature — Constant is dismissed 
— De Stall's Comment — Bernadotte and Corinne — Delphine 
appears — Bonaparte's Comments — A Pen-Portrait of 
Corinne — Madame at Weimar, in Vienna and Stockholm — 
Corinne' s Regard for England — Her Son Augustus — Some 
Fatherly Advice — Projected Visit to America — De I'Alle- 
magne — A Machine d Mouvement — Napoleon disgusted with 
her Views — Goethe and de Stael's Work on Germany — The 
Visit to Russia — " The Conscience of Europe " — Stein and 
de Stael — Her Essay on Suicide — Goes to London — Byron's 
Opinion of Corinne— Death in 1817— Gour gaud and 
Madame — Napoleon's Impartial Opinion of her Qualities 

CHAPTER XV 

BiOGi — Chateaubriand — Stendhal . . 258 

An Unstoried Celebrity — Biogi and Bonaparte — Philosopher 
and Artist — Biogi and the Military Art— The Corsican's 
Affection for him — Poisons and Antidotes — The Battle-field 
of Rivoli — Berthier and Bonaparte — Biogi dislikes Army 
Men — Bonaparte as Connoisseur — Gros and the Areola 
Picture — Biogi' s Description of the Corsican — M. de 
Chateaubriand — The Vicomte and the First Consul — A 
Mutual Antipathy — LeGinie du Christianisme — Essentially 
anti-Catholic — Chateaubriand's Egotism — The Little Man 
and the Big Quarry— The Vicomte is dismissed— His 
Colossal Vanity — His Obsession as to Napoleon — Some 
Expressions of Opinion — " Napoleon and Myself" — Beyle, 
alias Stendhal — His Literary Pedigree — The Individualistic 
Touch — His Connection with Napoleon — Stendhal's Idolatry 
— His Impartiality — France and the Empire — Napoleon's 
Dead-heads — Stendhal and the ex-Empress Eugenie — An 
Author's Discretion — Stendhal, Megalomaniac — Napoleon's 
Trust in him — An Imperial Present — The " Soul" of the 
Imperial Army— Stupid Officialdom— Napoleon, France's 



14 CONTENTS 

Chapter XV. — contd. 

Greatest Man — His Best Achievement — " The Great 
Emperor " — A Change of Temper — A Literary Man's 
Philosophy — Napoleon diminishes — A Final Recantation — 
" Napoleon was our only Religion " 



CHAPTER XVI 

Imperial Official Theatre . . . 273 

One of Napoleon's Chief Ambitions — Instructions to Cham- 
pagny — Authors and their Rights — Assurance of Remunera- 
tion — Where Napoleon failed — Imperial Art mediocre — 
Limitations of Patronage — Genius discovers itself — Always 
its own Patron — Imperial Epoch unfavourable to Art — 
Some Liberal Awards — Tragedy, not Comedy — The 
Thedtre-Franfais — Decree of Moscow — Napoleon a Real 
Benefactor — Schools of Dramatic Art — His Liberality to 
the Histrions — The Dresden Bill — His Practical Patronage 
— His Friends among the Illuminati — Did he like Artists ? 
— Remarks by Rimusat — After Marengo — A Line from 
Cinna — The Murder of Enghien 

CHAPTER XVII 

Conclusion . . . . . 283 

Kircheisen's Bibliography of Napoleon — One Book wanting — 
The Temperamental Aspect of Bonaparte — The " Napoleon" 
Test of Nationality — A Modern Imitator — The Imperishable 
Corsican 

Bibliography . ... . 289 

Index ...... 298 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE REAL NAPOLEON. By Vigneux . Frontispiece 

TALMA AS NERO . . .To face page 76 

MADEMOISELLE GEORGE . . „ 100 

THE CORONATION. By David . „ 154 

THE CHATSWORTH NAPOLEON. By Canova ,, 168 

PAULINE BONAPARTE AS VENUS VICTRIX. 

By Canova ... ,, 218 

MADAME DE STAEL, 1804. By Godefroy „ 248 

DAEDALUS AND ICARUS. By Canova „ 278 



IS 



CHAPTER I 
THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

The Rule of Heredity— Man the Supersimian — Role 
of the Spinal Column — A Cynical Truism—Napoleons 
Splendid Eqicipjne7it—Lord Acton's View— Social 
Origins of the Bonapartes— Their Middle-class Status 
— The Nursery of Fame— Corsica and its Natives- 
Napoleons Regard for his Island Home— Bonaparte s 
Ligurian Ancestry— King Theodore of Corsica— His 
Relationship to the Bonapartes — Paoli and Bonaparte 
pere — The Bonapartes as Men of Law — A Lawyer s 
Importance in Ajaccio— Ancestral Pretensions of Bona- 
parte pere--Phe7io?nenal Types and New Blood 

Factions of the Mala and Buona Parte— Ajaccio and 
Napoleon s Ancestors— The Aristocrats of the Pale— 
The Provincialism of the Bonapartes — Their Love 
of Learning— Their Esprit de Foyer— The Spirit of 
the Clan — Napoleons Mania of Superiority— His 
Jealousy of Famous Men — His Opinion about Ccesar, 
Hannibal, Alexander — Relations with his Master 
Generals — Le Harnais Militaire — Napoleon's Master 
Passion 



REPRODUCTION of the immediate and 
normal stock is the rule of heredity, 
the experts tell us ; whereas reproduc- 
tion of the remote and phenomenal is 
the exception. The supersimian called Man 
inherits intuitions, instincts, predispositions and 
temperamental traits from his ancestors, even 
as he reproduces their physical attributes and 
tendencies. This being the case, we deduce 
correctly when we say man's destiny is not so 
much what is to be, as what has been, and 
those eugenists are probably right who declare 
the drab and unpoetical truth — namely, that in 
the last analysis man's spinal cord is his very 
self, his nature and potential — that which fits or 
unfits him for the fight in life, which determines 
his character, his courage and his driving force, 
which makes him the clever or the inept animal 
among the human herd, which decides for his 
annals as they shall be — humble, mediocre, or the 
opposite. Fontenelle, the distinguished nephew of 
the great Corneille, told the unhappy truth, we fear, 
when he said that for supreme success or domination 
in the world there was one prime requisite, and 
he named it when he wrote the phrase: "a 
callous heart in a sound body." Put this axiom 
of worldly wisdom beside one of the profoundest 
and most cogent verdicts we have yet seen 
contributed to the explanation of the eternal 
Corsican — in effect, that the wonderful mind of 
Napoleon was lodged in a wonderful body,' 

' Napoleon : The Last Phase. 

i8 



GENEALOGY OF NAPOLEON 19 

and we find ourselves on the way to divining the 
personaUty of the being whom Cardinal Newman 
once described as a Miracle of Natm^e. 

And yet Lord Acton was, after all, right : the 
more we study the Corsican in the light of histori- 
cal documents, the less a Colossus does he appear, 
though perhaps he grows nearer, being found to be 
so human a creature, to the sympathetic student's 
heart. Not only as a man and a statesman does 
he lose stature, as we investigate the method by 
which he sought at all costs to stamp one vast 
impression of himself upon the page of History ; 
he even dwindles as a soldier, and the day has 
gone for good, we think, when men could solemnly 
accept such a verdict as the following, rendered 
by Lockhart and subscribed to in the main by 
two generations of the Victorian century : 

" Nations yet to come will look back upon his 
history, as to some grand and supernatural 
romance. The fiery energy of his youthful career, 
and the magnificent progress of his irresistible 
ambition have invested his character with the 
mysterious grandeur of some heavenly appear- 
ance ; and when all the lesser tumults and lesser 
men of our age shall have passed away into the 
darkness of oblivion, history will still inscribe one 
mighty era with the majestic age of Napoleon." 

Given the theory of ancestral environment, the 
genealogy of Napoleon becomes of first-class 
importance if we wish to understand, or come 
near to an understanding of, that momentous 
personality which to a large extent has set the 



20 i THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

fashion in spectacular greatness ever since its 
appearance in the world at the close of the 
eighteenth century. In the case of great men, 
says Stendhal, biographers are apt to fall into 
one of two excesses : either they attribute a 
fabulous ancestry to their heroes, or else out of 
sheer envy and malice, they seek to show that 
those of whom they write were of far lower and 
meaner origin than was actually the case. This 
has been so with Napoleon, though all attempts 
either to exalt or to abase him in respect of his 
ancestry, have resulted only in forcing us to 
recognise the truth of La Bruyere's assertion — 
namely, that there are no families in the world, 
whether exalted or plebeian, which, could we 
accurately trace their pedigrees, would not be 
found to touch the loftiest origins, at one particular 
point, and the lowliest at some other. 

The Bonapartes had already been several genera- 
tions in Corsica when Napoleon was born, and his 
four great-grandfathers, Bonaparte, Paravisino 
(Paravicini), Ramolino and Pietra-Santa were all 
of grandparents born in the highland canton of 
Lunegiana, under the Ligurian Apennines and 
about forty miles direct east from Genoa. There 
is little doubt, we think, for all the attempts to 
confer an exalted social ancestry upon Napoleon, 
that his forbears for six generations before his 
birth had occupied in Corsica a local position 
corresponding, we may suppose, to the minor 
lairds of Scotland, and there is no question that 
the subsequent ennobling of certain Corsican 



TRIBE OF BUONAPARTE 21 

families about 1770— including the Bonapartes — 
by a royal decree of Louis XVI., was due solely 
to the policy of bringing the newly annexed 
islanders into social and political alignment with 
the system in France, even as Napoleon was to 
ennoble certain of his " gentle peasants " of 
Holland in 1810. That in the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries, the tribe of Buonaparte had 
occupied high political position in Italy, is much 
less certain than that their name had been inscribed 
on several civic golden books, like that of Treviso, 
simply because members of the race had filled 
more or less important magistracies and alderman- 
ships in their home towns ; and on the whole we 
are of opinion not only that so titanic an energy, 
physical and mental, as that of Napoleon could 
never have sprung from a very ancient line of 
leisurely or even refined aristocrats, but that 
this very energy, whether in its personal, its 
political or in its social symptoms, bore at all 
times the impress of having come from the common 
source of nearly all names which achieve a universal 
fame — to wit, the educated or upper classes, as 
apart from the patriciate, and of course education 
here means very much more than mere instruction, 
or academic learning. 

Corsica is far from being without its ancient 
chronicle, and Seneca is said to have declared of 
its inhabitants that their first law was the law 
of vengeance. A Corsican writer of the Middle 
Ages, Petrus Cyrnoeus, already told the world 
that " the Corsicans are a factious race and live 



22 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

only for glory. Vengeance is the mainspring of 
their code of honour, and in order to avenge an 
insult or an injury, they will move heaven, earth 
and hell to obtain full satisfaction. Whether he 
be dead or alive, beware of the Corsican who has 
not avenged himself on an aggressor." The stories 
of Corsican vendette, we are all acquainted with, 
and even Napoleon was the object of one of these 
throughout his career, his enemy, Pozzo di Borgo, 
a distant relative by marriage, never having 
forgiven him the fact that when both were 
candidates for a colonelcy of Corsican national 
guards, the preference had been given to the future 
emperor. We are inclined to think, however, 
that too much importance has been attached to 
Pozzo's diplomatic activities during the Empire, 
more particularly when it is asserted that ideas 
of vengeance were really the inspiration of his 
enmity for Napoleon, as well as of the many 
intrigues by which he sought to destroy the 
imperial fabric. The method of attaining to fame 
by attacking one who has already attained to fame 
has, it is well known, been a favourite one among 
doomed mediocrities of all ages, and the Emperor's 
relentless compatriot does not appear ever at any 
time to have proved insensible of his opportunity. 
Napoleon has been accused of having had no 
love for Corsica, just as he has been accused of 
looking upon France '' as a throne rather than a 
nation," to quote an illustrious Russian. Here, 
in point, is what the Emperor himself, when at 
St Helena, had to say of his native island : 



A RACIAL PUZZLE 23 

" The Corsicans have always had something 
in them of a race apart, and this is due to their 
insular position, which preserves them from con- 
tact with the mixed peoples of the mainland. 
Corsican highlanders possess an energy of char- 
acter and a firmness of soul which are entirely 
peculiar to them. And as for the beauty of that 
little island — nothing could exceed it. Even the 
very presence of its soil I could note with eyes 
closed, and I have never known its like anywhere. 
I can see myself there in my earliest years and 
my first affections, tricking my way round the 
mountain precipices, climbing the loftiest peaks, 
careering down the passes and playing in the 
silent valleys, ever the most devoted of partisans 
in my family's feuds, and taking sides with all 
my kith and kin in a vendetta which went back 
seven generations. ... I even thought of taking 
refuge there in 1815, and am certain that I should 
have w^on over all the inhabitants, who would 
have accepted me as their King and who would 
have been to me as one great family. Do you 
think that even fifty thousand of the Allied troops 
would have ventured to attack me there ? And 
even if they had, to what end — to gain what ? " 

Are the Corsicans to be numbered among the 
racial puzzles of the world ? They are said to 
have sprung originally from some remote Iberian 
stock, and characteristics which have been found 
among the people of Albania, of the Basque 
countries and the Berbers of Northern Africa, 
are admitted by anthropologists to be common 



24 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

to the inhabitants of the island. In the course 
of the early ages, the Phoenicians — as in Ireland, 
be it noted, which is famous for its reproduction 
of the Napoleonic type — the Carthaginians, the 
Ligurians and the Iberians founded small and 
nomadic colonies, until the Greeks finally estab- 
lished a civilisation there some six centuries 
before Christ. Subsequently, on account of their 
piratical practices, they were driven thence by 
the people of Etruria, who succeeded in finally 
and permanently impressing their cachet on the 
islanders. The Bonapartes, as we have seen, 
were of Ligurian origin, and in the earliest days 
of Roman civilisation, the people of Liguria were 
held to be of Germano-Gallic rather than Italic 
stock, which was short and broad-headed, while 
the Ligurians were tall and long-headed — the 
family type of the Napoleons, to which their 
great chief proved, however, an exception. All 
writers, ancient as well as modern, agreed in 
attributing one salient characteristic to the 
Corsicans — namely, that they appeared to con- 
sider themselves superior to other races, and 
would voluntarily engage in no servile or menial 
work ; the native was sober, obliging, hospitable, 
grateful, a firm friend, a terrible enemy, logical, 
practical, inclined to be sultanic in his treatment 
of women, intriguing and always very curious to 
know what the other man was doing, expansive 
with his friends, silent and reserved with strangers. 
A German writer, Razel, declares that until the 
eighteenth century no Corsican generation had 



THE PROUD ISLANDERS 25 

existed which had not known either invasion or 
civil war — an important point. 

Diodorus Siculus said of these islanders that 
the hardest Roman slave-masters dared not 
subject them to the ordinary tasks of other 
helots on account of their rebellious and intract- 
able character. *'They will not live in slavery," 
says Strabo, " and if they do not kill themselves 
before submitting to the degradation of low 
menial work, they so conduct themselves as to 
make their masters regret the money expended 
on their purchase." After the fall of the Roman 
Empire, Corsica, in the seventh century, they 
teach, came under the domination of Constan- 
tinople and then received that strong religious 
impress which informs the general character of 
the native with a mysticism that is hardly to 
be differentiated from superstition. Charlemagne 
handed them over to the Popes in the tenth 
century, and the Saracens carried fire and sword 
through the island in the eleventh, after which a 
feudalism of a Germanic type settled for some 
centuries upon the country, administered and 
inspired in the main by high Ligurian officials. 
Nevertheless the spirit of the clan was ever so 
powerful a characteristic of Corsican society, that 
the feudal lords practised a larger liberalism in 
their exactions from, and their dealings with, 
the proud islanders than was customary, under 
the system, with less independent races. Every 
Corsican became a rebel at the first sign of 
oppression on the part of his lord, and so there 



26 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

grew up a society of men who would acknowledge 
no masters — another important point. 

It is not surprising, therefore, to find them in 
1730 declaring an entire independence of Genoa 
and, at the outbreak of hostilities, inaugurating 
a theological council which, by asserting that 
justice was on the side of the revolting islanders, 
gave to the whole uprising the character of a 
holy war. The Genoese called in the help of 
several corps of German troops of the Emperor 
Charles VI., under the command of the Prince 
of Wurtemberg, who was only too pleased to sign 
a treaty of peace with the invincible islanders in 
1732. In 1736 a German adventurer of noble 
birth. Baron Theodore von Neuhof, arrived in 
the port of Aleria, and having assured the popular 
leaders of his possession of great influence at the 
courts of Europe, offered to undertake the final 
liberation of the island from Genoese tyranny. 
Eventually, after the distribution of considerable 
largess, Theodore was named King of Corsica, 
and besides founding a nobihty, also inaugur- 
ated many civic reforms, invited foreign in- 
dustrialists to take up residence in Corsica, 
disciplined the army and ultimately attacked 
Genoa. Success did not attend on his extra- 
insular military expeditions, however, and he 
soon found himself obliged to have recourse to 
his great diplomatic and poHtical friends on the 
mainland. He left the island, appointing a 
regency of four persons, one of whom was 
Jacopo Ornano, a blood relation of the Bonapartes. 



CHARLES DE BONAPARTE 27 

Theodore came back in 1738, but only for a 
short while, and left again for the Continent, 
entrusting all interests to his great-nephew Baron 
Drost, who afterwards, be it noted, married a 
lady of the Bonaparte tribe. The King again 
returned to the island in 1743, provided with 
plenty of arms and munitions ; he had grown 
despotic, however, during his exile, and being 
badly received by the popular leaders, went back 
to London, where he was arrested for debt and 
spent several years in the Fleet, until released by 
the good offices of Horace Walpole. All of which 
we mention only to show that the adventure of 
bold and successful usurpation was certainly 
not lacking among the inspirations which sub- 
sequently moved the young soldier of Italy to 
exalted self- promotion. 

In the stirring days when Paoli took command 
of affairs in Corsica, he employed the services 
of Charles Bonaparte, father of Napoleon, as 
personal secretary. This gentleman had married, 
at the age of eighteen, a beautiful girl of fifteen, 
Letitia Ramolino. It is worth noting that apart 
from the fact that this alliance was a genuine 
love match — always an important condition for 
the children issuing — it contained many other 
elements of a Romeo-and-Juliet type, since the 
Ramolini were really of the Genoese faction, while 
the Bonapartes were of the insurgent side — 
Guelphs and Ghibellines, again, on a minor scale, 
or Capulets and Montagues of Verona. Like the 
honourable wife and mother she ever proved 



28 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

herself, Letitia gave up her hfe with singular 
devotion to the interests of her husband's 
people, and ruled the family home at Ajaccio 
with the impartial severity and justice of a Roman 
matron. The old home of the Bonapartes no 
longer exists, it may be said, for all the venal 
assurances of the local ciceroni. The actual 
house, near the site of the present one, was much 
smaller, and the Bonaparte family rented only 
half of it at that — some indication, we may 
presume, that their means were of a limited 
extent/ In 1771 Charles Bonaparte, who was 
a Doctor of Law, had been appointed a kind 
of exec!utive judge (giudice assesore) to the high 
court of Ajaccio, a town which boasted at that 
time a population of 3000 inhabitants. The 
name Napoleon was common enough in Corsica 
in several families with which the Bonapartes 
were connected, and was spelled impartially 
Napoleone, Nabulione, Lapulione, NapoUone, and 
was probably derived from the old Genoese 
patronymic Nebulone. 

The Bonapartes had relatives in nearly all 
classes of the local society, but the majority of 
the allied families were small landowners who also 
engaged in the wine and corn trades. Charles 
Bonaparte, as a member of the high court — with 
£40 a year as a stipend ! — was admittedly the 

^ It has been estimated that the Bonapartes lived for several years 
on less than ;^ioo a year. Those who are at all acquainted with the 
7n6nages of provincial Italy are well aware that such a sum is often 
made to go to very respectable lengths— for middle-class Italians. 



AN ISLAND COMMUNITY 29 

head of the family alhance, more particularly 
when he had been chosen member of the com- 
mission of twelve representative Corsican nobles. 
There is no doubt whatever, we think, that though 
Bonaparte yere was disposed to be something 
of a spendthrift and a high liver, he was a man 
of considerable refinement, great literary tastes, 
ever looking to the advancement of his family. 
To this end, indeed, he engaged in several schemes 
which caused his integrity to be called in question 
more than once, and like the good time-server he 
was, saw no harm in making the public treasury pay 
the limit for his services. So we find him writing 
to M. de Calonne, in 1784, asking for assistance : 

" I am the father of seven children, Monseigneur, 
the eighth already on its way, and being almost 
without fortune for the reasons herein mentioned, 
have the honour to solicit your protection and 
your justice in favour of my poor family. ..." 

In no country in the world is the principle of 
equality and fraternity carried into practice to the 
same extent as in Corsica, says Prosper de Merimee 
in his work En Corse, and if real democracy has 
a home anywhere, it is certainly in this island 
where the employers and employed live on terms 
of tribal famiharity, the result being that "rich 
and poor," to quote the Frenchman, " hold the 
same ideas, since they are always exchanging 
them." The wealthiest man in Ajaccio in those 
days was, it is recorded, worth about £8000 — a 
certain Signor Baciocchi, of whose family the 
world has also heard. 



30 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

It is fairly well established now that the 
Bonapartes of Ajaecio had but few documents 
going to prove that their line had once been 
either a very ancient or a very splendid one. The 
alliances which the family had made since their 
arrival on the island were in all probability what 
the French term " tres honorables," meaning 
very respectable, but by no means very exalted. 
Charles Bonaparte would appear to have been 
highly proud of his connection with the minor 
squires Bozzi and Ornano, through which con- 
nections the oldest Corsican blood was trans- 
mitted to the Napoleons. By Letizia's side, they 
claimed descent from the mighty Colonna gens 
of the twelfth century, and in the days of his 
own greatness Napoleon emphasised this claim 
on behalf of his then exalted tribe. With regard 
to the many expedients to which Bonaparte 
pere resorted in order to establish beyond question 
the nobility of his blood, it has to be remembered 
in his lasting favour that by proving a patrician 
ancestry, he not only guarded against the possi- 
bility of seeing his patent revoked — an unconscion- 
able dishonour to a Corsican — but also assured to 
his sons and daughters the best possible education 
at governmental expense, as so-called King's 
scholars. If, as we are assured on high authority, 
the Corsicans were genuine democrats to a man, 
we may be certain that Charles Bonaparte was 
moved to make his ancestral pretensions rather 
that his children might benefit, than for any 
advantage he was likely to derive himself from 



"DIE WUNDERBARE SAFT " 31 

doing so. We are not aware, at all events, that 
anyone has ever accused a single member of the 
Imperial family of having shown traits of that 
social meanness which goes by the name of 
snobbery. The patent of nobiHty granted to 
the House of Bonaparte by the Government of 
Louis XVI. was made out, it may be said, not so 
very long ago, as family pedigrees count — namely, 
in 1771 — a year which, Scotsmen will hardly require 
to be told, saw the birth of the author of Waverley . 
We express a personal view, of course, when 
we venture the opinion that it is only the really 
new families that ever produce phenomenal types.^ 
x4.nd by the term new we mean those families 
which have up till their production of a rare 
entity — nigroque simillima cycno — remained in 
quiet obscurity, unknown, not unhonoured, but un- 
sung. Very old and well-known races of the world 
must necessarily have gathered in the process of 
the ages, not only experience, but also all the 
philosophic outlook — mostly sceptical, if not con- 
temptuous and altogether pessimist — with which 
experience, in the long run, cannot fail to invest 
the wisdom of reflective men. Such a philosophy 
of scepticism is wholly adverse, however, to great 

^ We admit a certain vagueness here. Our opinion is based on 
the assumption that blood has no absolute standard, or specific type, 
but that the varieties of its quality must be as the number of human 
kinds and characters. Consequently the fusion, or combination, 
which is likely to produce a human phenomenon — and mankind has 
produced but a few, historically considered — would normally recur 
about once in every two or more cycles, as History has shown, we 
think. Assuming certain figures, it is a simple " probability " sum. 



32 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

performance in any domain of human activity, 
seeing that in the longest space of time allotted 
to man, hardly more than the bases of any 
enduring fame can be securely laid. Who had 
heard — apart from Marius, himself not a Caesar 
— of the family of Julius before the conqueror 
of Gaul had brought the Julian gens into promi- 
nence ? What sort of men did Cromwell come 
from ? Who was Luther's grandfather ? How 
long were Aristotle's ancestors resident at Stagira ? 
What were the Habsburgs doing before Rudolph's 
day ? Or who, apart from a few musicians, ever 
heard of the Wellesleys before Wellington's age ? 
Or of the Churchills before the days of Marlborough? 
We are of opinion, consequently, that Nature 
provides her portents from especial fusions of 
new blood based on the selective principle. This 
idea leads, of course, to the conclusion that no 
man who is not especially called to great perform- 
ance can by any labour of his own achieve a high 
destiny, or renown. Nor do we think that oppor- 
tunity, or environment, or luck, or any other of 
many moot conditions can explain the advent 
of an overwhelming personality in the world. 
Blood — the wonderful juice, as Goethe called it — 
seems to us to provide the key to the mystery 
of individual phenomenalism on the earth, and it 
appears to be new blood at that. All of which 
leads us to the view that there is really nothing 
subjective in creation, and that man is merely 
an instrument through which nature expresses 
itself and its design. 



" QUO PATRE ORTUS ? " 33 

The story of the Bonapartes and their origin 
appears to be a case in point. It seems to be 
established that the tribe of Buonaparte cannot 
trace a clear descent, under that name, before the 
twelfth century. It was only during the quarrels 
of the Guelphs and GhibelHnes that families came 
to be known either as members of the good side 
or huona parte, or as members of the mala parte 
or bad side, entirely according to the political 
point of view of the particular partisan. The 
Bonapartes, as a result of these quarrels, issued 
with the patronymic Buona Parte for their family 
name. What it had been before those days no 
one apparently knows for certain, though, of 
course, conjecture is not wanting ; some genealo- 
gists tracing their origin to the hereditary Roman 
Caesars, others to the Byzantine Caesars, some 
giving them affiliation with the Orsini and 
Colonna houses, while others go back the whole 
way to the great House of Macedon. But if the 
original family had been of high standing or great 
antiquity, there would have been no possibility 
of its concealing itself, for any political reason, 
under the generic sobriquet of a faction. Hence 
we are inclined to the view that the original 
Bonaparte tribe was either of the modest middle 
classes, or else of the nameless or foundling type, 
and consequently belonged to the new type which 
we have tried to suggest. All honest attempts 
to trace their ascent before the twelfth century 
to the Janfelds, podestci at San Stefano, or to 
Castruccio Castracani, the dictator of Lucca, 



34 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

have been unsuccessful. Indeed we have nothing 
positively certain of the Bonaparte family until 
they had become fairly settled in Corsica, and 
the first public document which bears the signa- 
ture of a Bonaparte is dated 14th May 1485 — 
about the time when Richard III. was making 
his last stand for the crown of England. 

The Bonapartes moved to Ajaccio about the 
first decade of the sixteenth century, where a 
certain Francis Bonaparte was generally known 
to his fellow-citizens as the Moor, whether from 
his bronzed complexion, or from the fact that 
he had served under Ludovico Moro, we know 
not. He had a son Gabriel who served in the 
Genoese mercenaries and afterwards became a 
priest and subsequently a canon of the diocese. 
An illegitimate half-brother of this gentleman, 
Luca by name, once had his face severely slapped 
by an Ornano in the streets of Ajaccio. He 
waited some years for his vendetta and then 
murdered the assailant on the steps of his home, 
affixing the offending hand, pierced by a dagger, to 
a panel of the hall-door. Blood of this particular 
cuvee cannot but have contributed to the for- 
midable personality of the great descendant. 
Even up to 1550 the Bonapartes considered them- 
selves, as immigrants from Liguria, to be of much 
superior stock to the islanders, and one Jerome 
Bonaparte, a son of the aforesaid Gabriel, the 
priest — whom we may charitably suppose to 
have become a widower before he took Orders — 
appears about 1579 as a strenuous supporter of 



MEDIEVAL PETTIFOGGERS 35 

a kind of social and political Pale which was 
established to the exclusion of the islanders and 
in favour of the immigrants from the mainland. 
One Pozzo di Borgo took up the cause of the 
islanders, and thus prepared the way for a political 
vendetta which was to declare itself on a higher 
level, more than two centuries later, between 
descendant members af the same two clans. 

This Jerome Bonaparte, a lawyer by the way, 
married the daughter of a prosperous landed 
proprietor, whose inheritance he added to by 
lucky speculations as well as by successful claims 
to property formerly in the possession of his bride's 
family. It is about the time of this worthy that 
we find the Bonaparte tribe engaged in the wine 
and corn trades, among them Augustus Bona- 
parte, brother of Jerome, who was also an elder 
of the community of Ajaccio, and once dis- 
tinguished himself by cornering the bread supplies 
to his own personal profit. For the most part, 
however, the Bonapartes engaged in the pro- 
fession of attorney, a business calculated, we 
suppose, to give its practitioners more than 
ordinary opportunities for studying human 
nature. The Corsican attorney of the sixteenth, 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, more- 
over, a man of considerable prominence in his 
community and corresponded, in a large measure, 
to the municipal solicitor of our own time, his 
role being socially, politically and commercially of 
first-class importance within his own environment. 

The profession required much energy in those 



36 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

days, for the local attorney counted for some- 
thing in little things as well as big. Even the 
hiring out of a dun cow or the sale of a little 
patch of land required a contract. However 
modest their means, a Corsican couple would 
scorn to enter into the marriage contract without 
first visiting a lawyer. And even promises of 
marriage were registered at his office, for the 
failure of one of the two contracting parties to 
keep the plighted word would inevitably mean 
a bloody family feud. Then the office of 
the lawj^er was the especial rendezvous of the 
parolanti, or interveners, the people who under- 
took to settle matters, to talk the other fellow 
over, or to compromise a quarrel, or even to bring 
together the parties to a vendetta, in order to 
debate the question whether, after all, there was 
any real motive for vengeance on either side — 
the results of all such matters being duly recorded 
by the essentially impartial pettifogger who, of 
course, did not fail to collect his honorarium. 
He also it was who engrossed the petitions sent 
up to the higher powers by the Httle people, and 
if a man thought his forte was that of street- 
sweeping, the lawyer drew up his formal request 
to the municipal authorities and forwarded it 
with his own recommendation to the proper 
quarter. A notorious bandit of veteran standing, 
anxious to make his soul, as the saying is, and 
desirous of seeing the old home before he died, 
would send an agent to the lawyer from his 
mountain lair, offering to surrender to the civic 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 37 

powers a portion of his plunder, provided his 
previous offences were condoned and the ban of 
legal excommunication removed. On another 
occasion the attorney might draw up a deed after 
the following fashion : — 

" The noble and magnificent Giuseppe Carbone 
having on May 5 slain a bandit, and having 
therefore acquired the right, according to the 
civil and criminal statutes of the island of Corsica, 
to designate for reprieve any other bandit now 
under sentence of death, desires that clemency 
shall be extended to Carolo Perfetto recently 
convicted of murder and perjury." 

The noble and magnificent Carbone, having 
performed this act of justice, returns home with 
a clear conscience, not unmindful of the fact that 
he has assured himself a firm ally in Carolo 
Perfetto, should he ever require assistance in a 
little matter of blood-letting, or even in a case 
where well-considered perjury would be likely to 
help his fortunes over the rough spots. 

Francis Bonaparte succeeded Jerome as the 
lawyer of Ajaccio, but does not appear to have 
added to the family wealth; and it would appear 
that from 1625, when this ancestor sold the 
property of La Villetta, near Ajaccio, the terri- 
torial possessions of the Bonapartes began to 
dwindle very rapidly. In 1632, indeed, the 
record shows that he was forced to pledge a small 
golden relic, with his arms engraven on the same, 
for about twelve shillings. Francis was, in due 
course, succeeded by his son, Sebastian Bonaparte, 



38 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

whose eldest, Charles, became the father of 
Joseph Bonaparte. This worthy married a 
daughter of the squirearchic Corsican family of 
Bozzi in which the baptismal name Napoleon 
was common and whose ancestors had served 
under the French King Henri II. when the English 
lost Calais in the middle of the sixteenth century. 
This is the point at which the Italian Bonaparte 
stock receives its first infiltration of pure Corsican 
blood : by the small but ancient territorial 
properties which enter into the family with that 
aUiance, the Napoleons become Corsicans of 
Corsica, and the old prejudices of the Genoese 
Pale pass for ever. A son of this marriage, 
Sebastian Nicholas, became the husband of Maria 
Tusoli, a daughter of one of the fiery factionaries 
of the island and also a Corsican of the purest 
blood. They had three children, Joseph, Napoleon 
and Lucien, and from the marriage of the first 
of these, Joseph, with Maria Paravisino, sprang 
Charles Bonaparte, the father of the mighty 
Napoleon. Letitia, his wife, was of the Ramolini 
tribe, whose ancestors were squires of Istria and 
officers in the armies of Venice. 

It is clear, therefore, from all which precedes 
that at no point of the known line do there 
appear to be any conditions which might contri- 
bute to a transmission of artistic leanings in the 
Bonaparte family. On the contrary, everything 
seems to mark the men out for professions which 
are the extreme opposite of anything] artistic ; 
while the women, wholly unlettered and in the 



GENS BUONAPARTIANA 39 

main somewhat paysannes in speech, in manner 
and in their meticulous housewifery, seem to be 
chosen for their " points " and as Ukely in all cases 
to " throw " healthy children. All their men, 
indeed, are apt and clever animals and all their 
women unfailing breeders, the only spiritual 
tendency observable in any of the stock being 
the insistence with which each father decides that 
the sons shall have the best possible scholarly 
education, without which, they are fully well 
aware, no inferior can climb to higher social rank. 

" The Bonapartes," says de Rocca, in effect, 
"were not the richest people in Ajaccio; they 
were not even the best -born. On their arrival 
there, they occupied a very modest position in 
the tow^n, but had derived from their Genoese 
ancestors that taste for letters and learning with- 
out which no man can change his condition in 
life. Beside this individual ambition we find a 
kind of racial ambition, a patient seeking for self- 
perfectioning which maintains them on a level 
above their contemporaries. In their little sphere 
they distinguish themselves by qualities of culture 
which raise them even when their means are dis- 
appearing. This solicitude for the family's future 
displays itself in the anxiety and craftiness with 
which they seek out patrons and protectors for 
their children ; as, for example, in their choice of 
prosperous and well-placed godfathers and god- 
mothers for their offspring. 

" This esprit de foyer, this tenaciousness of the 
Bonapartes in moving all influences in order to 



40 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

assure to their children a better place in life, this 
tireless object from generation to generation — all 
such effort is seen at its highest in Charles 
Bonaparte, whose son, Napoleon, is marvellously 
served by fortunate circumstances in his begin- 
nings : he is just noble enough to qualify for a 
king's cadetship and a free education which will 
be much superior to anything which his rivals, 
the Republican generals, will have received. 
Thanks to the democratic community from which 
he springs, he cannot, when the Revolution 
begins to decimate them, be accounted one of 
the officers of the ci-devant Had he come 
from Touraine, he could never have gone through 
the reign of terror and not been proscribed. It 
is the Corsican spirit of the clan which makes 
Napoleon give a throne to his brothers and 
sisters, and he distributes crowns among them 
just as the Corsican elders distribute their civic 
patronage among their own kith and kin. With- 
out seeking to decide what Napoleon owed in 
his mental formation to his ancestors of Corsica 
and Liguria, we may say that the foresight of his 
fathers prepared him for his destiny, while his 
native island furnished him at once with the 
elements of his grandeur and his destruction." 

The true Corsican's mania of superiority 
obsessed the Emperor to the end of his days, as 
his judgments of all great men clearly show, and 
we have covered much ground in our quest of a 
single criticism of any great historical character, 
which might be said to possess an impartial ring. 



" WHO BUT MUST LAUGH " 41 

" Napoleon," declared Madame de Remusat, 
" was jealous of all the great men of the world. 
He feared all signs of superiority and few who 
were near him ever failed to hear him express a 
predilection for mediocrities." 

When at St Helena his secretary, Baron 
Gourgaud, once mentioned Louis XI. and Henri 
IV. as being possible rivals in respect of per- 
sonal popularity in France. The fallen Emperor 
answered, as the Baron tells : 

" Saint Louis was an ass ; a just man, if you 
will, but he never achieved anything worthy of 
note. And as for that goat's-beard Henri IV. — 
he was an old fool. Louis XIV. was certainly the 
greatest King of his race. He and myself alone 
will count in our history ; only he and I had such 
great armies," and he does not fail to point out 
that Napoleon differed from Louis in one important 
consideration — namely, that the former com- 
manded his legions in person, and that the Roi- 
Soleil was never anything but a chef de parade. 

The Emperor does not deny that Alexander. 
Hannibal, Caesar, possessed " qualities." Never- 
theless his criticism of their various campaigns 
goes to indicate that their wars possessed nothing 
of the splendour and eclat, whether in conception 
or results, of his own. Alexander, he admits, 
calculated profoundly, executed boldly, led with 
judgment ; but " we cannot point in the case of 
the Macedonian to any manoeuvre which can be 
said to be worthy of a great general." Alexander 
appears to be simply a brave soldier — a grenadier 



42 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

like Leon Aune, this guardsman being about the 
equivalent of our own famous Shaw of the House- 
hold Cavalry, who fell at Waterloo. Hannibal 
he admits to have been the boldest and most 
audacious of all the conquerors of Antiquity — so 
adventurous, so sure, so great in all things, as he 
says of the Carthaginian w^ho had crossed both 
the Pyrenees and the Alps. 

" Yet, voyez-vous, this march of Hannibal from 
Collioure to Turin was quite a simple matter — a 
mere holiday tramp ; and as for the difficulties 
of the passage of the Alps, why, there were really 
none," is a commentary reported by Damas 
Hinard in his Opinions de Napoleon, vol. i., p. 79. 
Contrary to accepted historical opinion, which 
places (we think) the Carthaginian, as a patriot 
and a strategist, higher than all other conquerors, 
whether modern or ancient. Napoleon declares 
him inferior to Turenne and Conde, a comparison 
which w^ould place him on a plane about equal to 
that of Marlborough. Turenne would, had he 
suddenly arrived on the field of Wagram, have 
at once understood the tactical dispositions, 
Napoleon explains. But not so Hannibal. 

In regard to Caesar, whom the world has long 
been taught to look upon as the nearest known 
approach to the perfect prince among men : 
Napoleon deals with the Roman Colossus in an 
especial manner, for Caesar, he thinks, is the only 
spirit of all time that in any way challenges his 
own glory. Caesar, too, is inferior as a general 
to both Turenne and Conde and, par consequent. 



" —IF SUCH A MAN THERE BE ? " 43 

much less than the victor of Austerlitz. And 
Gourgaud shows us how the Emperor even envies 
the great Juhus his renown as an historian ; for 
after dictating a series of commentaries to his 
secretary, he turns to the latter, saying : 

" There you have something worth more than 
Caesar's. He gives no dates ; I do." And, we 
are assured by Hinard, the Emperor disliked to 
be told that it was Caesar's habit to take his 
ordinary rest on the night preceding a great 
battle. 

As for Gustavus Adolphus, the only respectable 
commander produced by the Thirty Years' War, 
in our opinion : 

" In eighteen months," pooh-poohs Napoleon, 
" this wonder gained one battle, lost another and 
was killed in a third. They are, indeed, not wrong 
who say that history is a romance. Men still 
talk of the wondrous exploits of this Swede, and 
of ourselves they will say —perhaps nothing I 
Yet Gustavus added nothing to the technical 
science of war ! " 

And, again, Charles XII. was a man who showed 
no results for his career ; the Marechal de Saxe 
— the soldier who met the Bloody Duke at 
Fontenoy — was brave '' but not by any means 
an eagle." Even Frederick the Great — to whom 
Napoleon surely owed his ideas about horse 
artillery — fails to meet with the approval of the 
Corsican, who declares in almost the same words 
which old Wurmser had used about himself in the 
Italian Campaign of 1796 : 



44 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

" Frederick breaks all the rules of war. What 
distinguishes him is not so much his skill in 
manoeuvres as his audacity. There was nothing 
very fine in his tactics at Rosbach, and cer- 
tainly he is not in the same class with Turenne. 
Frederick, for all his great military qualities, did 
not understand the proper use of artillery." 

So, then, we see that Alexander is only brave 
and that Hannibal, Caesar and Frederick are not 
on the same level as Turenne, Napoleon, of course, 
being, by construction, above them all. He is 
not more generous in dealing with his own lieu- 
tenants, whose glory he will only allow to reflect 
his own, as Madame de Remusat tells us in her 
Memoir es, adding, " and if they distinguished 
themselves, he would say that they only did their 
duty." When Davout, who had just won the 
battle of Auerstadt, really the decisive factor in 
the Jena Campaign, met his Emperor at Head- 
quarters, the day after, Na|)oleon, who had had 
sufficient time to compare and appraise the re- 
spective merits of Auerstadt and Jena, looked at 
his lieutenant very darkly, saying : 

"Vous n'avez pas mal fait — You didn't do 
so badly." 

He is careful, too, to move his generals from 
one force to another, in order that none shall 
become too popular with any particular army. 
There shall be no '' X of the Army of Y," as there 
had been a Bonaparte of the Army of Italy — if 
Napoleon can help it. In speaking of Hoche, 
whom, with Marceau, French experts rate on a 



" WHO M^OULD NOT WEEP " 45 

level equal to all that Bonaparte proved himself 
to be in Italy, the Emperor declared that, had it 
come to a definite rivalry between them, Hoche 
would have been crushed. Moreau, Napoleon 
admitted, was the only general sprung from the 
Revolution who was capable of causing him any 
anxiety. Yet he gives no credit to Moreau for 
the victory of Hohenlinden, which, far more than 
Marengo— too distant from the campaign's real 
political objective, Vienna — decided the sub- 
mission of Austria to Bonaparte's plans in 1800. 
Napoleon at St Helena described this great battle 
as a mere " rencontre heureuse," which — of course 
— disclosed no military talent. 

Then there was Massena — whom Disraeli, 
through the mouth of Sidonia, claimed as a fellow- 
Hebrew from the tribe of Manasseh : " Massena," 
said Napoleon, " possesses military talents before 
which we must bow." This general, it will be 
remembered, fought a three-day battle against 
the Russians under Korsakoff, at Zurich, in 1799, 
defeated them and saved France from invasion. 
Yet when Massena in 1804 wished to take the 
title Due de Zurich, in memory of the exploit which 
had won him the admiration of all France, 
Napoleon declined to sanction the choice on the 
ground that the suggested title was too German 
for a good Frenchman 1 Massena had to content 
himself with the dukedom of Rivoli, which re- 
called a first-class Bonapartian exploit. Thie- 
bault, an admirer of the Emperor, tells us that 
the Corsican never quite forgave Massena, who 



46 THE GENESIS OF NAPOLEON 

among soldiers and the people, held a reputation 
hardly inferior to that of Napoleon himself, and 
in order to destroy the Marshal's prestige with the 
public, sent him to conquer Portugal with forces 
entirely inadequate for the object in view. 
Furthermore, in order to make any likelihood of 
his great lieutenant's success all the more remote, 
two hot-heads like Ney and Junot, men whom 
only Napoleon himself could command, were 
given him as coadjutors. Massena, adds 
Thiebault, was too astute not to see through his 
master's motives, and at first refused to undertake 
the mission. Thiebault 's conclusion is one that is 
of interest in these days of great military exploit : 

" // semble que le harnais militaire est plus 
propice qu'aucun autre d provoquer, chez quiconque 
le porte, cette rage de gloire et cet entrainement a 
speculer sur la defaite du rival qui porte ombrageJ^ 

To which we may add another opinion in point 
from the excellent Monsieur de Remusat, who 
writes in the following strain, to his equally 
excellent wife ; — 

"It is amusing to hear these military men 
discuss one another ; how they run each other 
down, showing, or seeking to show, for how much 
good luck counts in successes which are won ; 
and tearing to shreds every reputation which 
outsiders like ourselves would have thought to be 
established on the most solid foundations." 

Taine was assuredly right when he declared 
that all independence — even its possibility — 
offended Napoleon, and that he could tolerate 



" —IF ATTICUS WERE HE ? " 47 

around him only such spirits as willingly hugged 
the chains of their slavery. Napoleon himself 
admitted his obsession more than once, and com- 
pared himself at times to an artist, or to a lover : 

" I love power," he told Roederer, " but I love 
it as only an artist loves his art." 

And on another occasion : 

"I have only one passion and one mistress — 
France. I wake with her, I sleep with her. My 
only mistress is power, and I worked too hard in 
winning her, to allow myself easily to be robbed 
of her, or even to be envied for possessing her." 

Or again : 

" Ambition is so much a part of my tempera- 
ment, of my constitution, that it has become the 
very blood of my veins and the very air which 
I breathe." 



CHAPTER II 
THE IMPERIAL STUDENT 



Napoleon s Academic Trahiing — The Curriculum at 
Brienne — The Classical and Language Course — On 
Literary Style — The Mathematical Studies — Religious 
Instruction — At the J^cole Militaire — The Subaltern- 
Student of Auxonne — Lnportance of History — Forma- 
tion of Literary Tastes — What Rousseau taught 
Napoleon — Machiavelli a Favourite — Was Bonaparte 
a Mason ? — Some Literary Attempts — His '' Heart's 
Library " — Some English Books 



CERTAIN French writers, among them 
Monsieur Gustave Mouravit, agree in 
thinking that the psychic side of 
Napoleon is best divined from a study 
of his private hbraries. Supposing this method 
to be a fair test of the intellectual or spiritual 
formation of an individual, we cannot fail to 
derive much profit from tracing his literary 
tastes back to the days of his early training 
at Brienne, where the young Corsican spent 
six years. French provincial colleges, whether 
military or civil, have not, even in respect of the 
various curricula followed, changed very much 
within the past hundred years or so, and those 
who have, as so many Britons now do, passed 
a few years in a congregational school on the 
Continent, will have no difficulty at all in recon- 
structing for themselves the Academy of Brienne, 
severe and semi-monastic, where the youthful 
Bonaparte began his first steps in polite learning. 
Then, as now, the so-called literary course began 
with the seventh, or grammar class, after which 
the pupil started his cours d'humanites. As a 
King's Cadet and an officer-to-be, young Bona- 
parte naturally chose the classical side, and in 
due course ascended through " Sixieme Latine," 
Fifth, Fourth, Third, Second, to First, or 
" Rhetoric." Latin was an essential — though 
Napoleon in after Hfe admitted to Wieland and 
Goethe that he was no great Latinist. 

Roman authors read all varied according to 
the Forms, the lower taking very simple works 

50 



" EN SIXIEME LATINE " 51 

like those of Eutropius, or easy passages from 
the Selectae or Colloquia of Erasmus, the Fables 
of Phaedrus. The middle forms read the Lives of 
Cornelius Nepos — De Viris Illustribus, we presume, 
the Eclogues, Caesar's Commentaries, Sallust's 
Jugurtha and Catihne. The higher classes 
read the Twenty-First Book of Livy, Cicero's 
Catiline and Pro Milone, the Odes and the Satires 
of Horace, the First, Second and Sixth Books of 
the ^neid, and the Fourth of the Georgics. 

The pupils in Rhetoric, we are told, were 
taught that there were three kinds of Oratory — 
namely, (1) the judicial ; (2) the demonstrative 
and (3) the dehberative. Three kinds of literary 
style— (1) the subhme style — '' dont Vecueil est 
Venflure, fair as pornpeux de paroles steriles " ; 
(2) the moderate style, Hke that of Telemaque, 
and (3) the simple style, of which La Bruyere 
was the chief model, and of which the literary 
professor of the Minimes acuminously observed : 
" ce style est plus difficile a attraper qu'on ne se 
V imagine y Literature was taught with evidently 
more care for the training of the pupil's cultivable 
mind than is the case in British Public Schools, 
and a satisfactory knowledge was required from 
each youth concerning the main characteristics 
and methods of thought and expression of Homer. 
Virgil, Lucian, ^sop, Phsedrus, Theocritus, 
Milton, Voltaire, Tasso and Camoens. Voltaire's 
Essay on Epic Poetry, passages from the Death 
of Ccesar and the Henriade were among the 
compulsory subjects, though Corneille, Racine, 



52 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT 

Fenelon, Bossuet, Massillon, Flechier and Boileau 
were naturally the favourite authors in this 
congregational academy. The oracle of the 
Minimes was Boileau. A work by the Abbe 
Vertot, entitled History of the Knights of Malta, 
was looked upon as a classic and was learned by 
heart ; Greek and Roman history, lectures on the 
story of France from the days of the early kings 
and an account of the " prodigious conquests " of 
the British in India made up the History course. 
Geography was studied somewhat perfunctorily, 
though considerable attention was devoted to the 
British Isles. There was no mention of Physics 
or Natural History, but German was a fairly 
general subject and the Mathematical schools 
were good so far as they went, which was, for 
the highest Form, in Algebra, to Logarithms and 
the Theorem ; in Geometry, to advanced studies 
of the Straight Line and Circle ; in Trigonometry, 
to the Solution of Triangles. 

Religious instruction was also given in the 
form of discourses on difficult points in the 
Catechism and, of course, there were classes in 
Bible History, which the students for the most 
part looked upon as the most tedious of all 
lectures. Napoleon was not lacking in piety, 
Chuquet tells us, when he first arrived at Brienne ; 
but it is also certain that the general tone of the 
school towards religious matters was well cal- 
culated to kill any devotion he may once have 
entertained for the Church, and he left there a 
confirmed unbeliever, even as most of his con- 



DEVOTIONAL SPRINTERS 53 

temporaries, who, after the manner of the esprits 
forts so fashionable in that age, affected, more 
especially in the upper lecture-rooms, to ridicule 
all matters connected with spiritual belief. It 
will interest those who have experience of this 
kind of foreign school-life to learn that the most 
popular professors among the priests were those 
who went through the daily Mass with the greatest 
dispatch. Thus a certain Pere Chateau, for 
example, was able to gallop through the ceremony 
au pas de charge, taking only four minutes and a 
half to celebrate a " dead " mass ; a certain P^re 
Berton, an ex-grenadier, by the way, was a good 
second favourite, with a record of from nine to ten 
minutes ; while a very old stager, Pere Genin, 
could even beat the Missal in less than fourteen 
minutes by the clock. 

On leaving Brienne and proceeding to the 
Military College in Paris, young Bonaparte's 
studies concerned themselves almost wholly with 
technical acquirements, and if the Corsican de- 
voted much time to other reading, we are not 
informed of the nature of the works which engaged 
his interest. It was not until 1785, when he was 
already a subaltern in the artillery, that he read 
Rousseau's Confessions which, he afterwards 
admitted, much affected his world-philosophy at 
the time. It seems a startling fact in these days 
of rapid military promotion, but it is true that 
Bonaparte remained for over five years a second 
lieutenant before he received his first step. 
During these years — which were divided between 



54 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT 

his regimental service and Corsica — the young 
subaltern gave himself up to all kinds of study 
which was likely to contribute to his intellectual 
formation, including original literary work. 

" My sense of time-economy was always large," 
he declared subsequently to the Prince-Primate 
at Erfurt, " and even when I had nothing to do, 
I was quick to realise that I had no time to lose." 

When on garrison duty at Auxonne, he read 
scores of historical works, including, as he tells us, 
Marigny's History of the Arabs, several works 
dealing with the government of Venice, Buffon's 
Natural History, Mably's Observations on the His- 
tory of France, a work on Frederick the Great, 
Baron Tott's Souvenirs of Turkey, Barrow's 
History of England, Mirabeau's Lettres de Cachet, 
Plato's Republic, 

The literary tastes of Napoleon may be said 
to have formed themselves during his garrison 
years from 1785 to 1791, and the possession of 
an extraordinary memory helped him to retain 
all that he read. It was about this time, too, 
that he began to show his preferences in regard 
to the theatre. He was no lover of the play of 
the comedy-of -manners type, and even of Moliere's 
plays he could say that they were mere drawing- 
room gossip — commirage de salon. His idea of 
the educative in the drama was based upon the 
stern realities of life, on destiny and on all those 
conditions of existence which reveal men unto 
themselves and force them to fight against the 
adverse fate which is ever ready to overwhelm 



INFLUENCE OF ROUSSEAU 55 

the resigned and the supine. Like all true 
Italians;, he was a lover of Tragedy, and it is a 
matter of record that himself, Joseph, Louis, 
Lucien and their sister Elisa enacted many of the 
masterpieces of Corneille and Racine at one time 
or another in private. Voltaire, Napoleon always 
held, was deficient in a proper understanding of 
men, their motives and their passions, and failed 
— like Tacitus — to appreciate the real nobleness 
which invariably inspires the ambitions and 
enterprises of all great men. Paul et Virginie 
attracted his interest in these days, as naturally 
did Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois, Men who 
associated with him at that time tell us how it 
was his habit to read aloud and so improve his 
French accent, which always remained bad — so 
much so indeed that sergeants, in reading the 
military orders of the day, used to mimic his 
pronunciation and say enfanterie for infanterie, 
and emphasise the ton nasillard which character- 
ised their young Corsican officer. 

Rousseau, the author of the Social Contract, of 
the Confessions and of Emile, counted for much 
in forming his philosophic outlook about this 
period, and helped him to attain that clear insight 
into men's character which distinguished the 
great intellectual rebel himself. In the days of 
Auxonne he thirsted, like Rousseau, after Justice 
and Liberty, fully agreed with Emile that 
" society was bad and much corrupted by ex- 
cessive civilisation," and sighed for the purity 
of character which he found among the heroes of 



56 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT 

his favourite Ossian. And strong with the idea 
that the Corsieans were the modern types of the 
ancient Gaehe warriors, he decided to write a 
history of his native island. In 1789 he trans- 
lated Boswell's Account of Corsica and con- 
cluded from a searching study of Cromwell that 
" revolutions provide a good opportunity for men 
who have audacity and courage." His study of 
Machiavelli pleases him, and from that philosopher 
he takes a phrase which is afterwards to help him 
generously on his life's journey : 

"It is better to be brutal with Fortune than 
to approach her with respect ; for Fortune is a 
woman, and he that seeks to win her must use 
violence rather than diplomacy." 

All and everything touching on the campaigns 
of the great captains of the world helps to fill 
up the busy days of mind-building, and he comes 
to the conclusion as a result of his researches in 
military history that : 

" In the last analysis, it is the soldier who 
governs ; one can only master a horse with boot 
and spur." The horse meaning, of course, the 
People. 

Chuquet is of opinion that Bonaparte became 
a Mason about the Valence period, and draws the 
conclusion therefrom that at any rate he had 
ceased to be a Catholic on taking up his com- 
mission ; a point of view which overlooks the 
fact that at the close of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth century — the Age 
of Reason — Freemasonry counted all sorts and 



WANTED— A UTOPIA 57 

conditions of prominent men within its fold, 
many of whom outwardly professed anti-Masonic 
religions and many who followed none at all. 
There is little doubt, in any case, that he was as 
favourable to Freemasonry as he was at heart 
antipathetic to Jewry, and in all probability 
had been initiated at some time or other into the 
low^er degrees. About 1790, Lucien tells us, he 
wrote an essay in which, as Voltaire in his own 
day had done, he sought to show that the life 
and teachings of Apollonius of Tyana — a mystical 
contemporary of Christ — exceeded in their in- 
fluence on the then existing world all that which 
had been exerted by the Bethlehemite. 

It was in 1791 that the Academy of Lyons 
decided to award a prize, equal in value to about 
£60 of our own money, for the best essay dealing 
with the essential conditions of human happiness. 
The young officer — ^then in his twenty-third year 
— became a candidate for this award, and in due 
course sent in his contribution, the sentiments of 
which indicated his revolt against the animalism 
of Rousseau, who maintained, it will be remem- 
bered, that food, a female and rest were all- 
sufficient for a man's happiness. Bonaparte 
advocated the necessity of reasoned sentiment 
in the world as the proper inspiration of social 
happiness and progress — sentiment being the 
principium of society and reason the force which 
held it together. Self -isolation was opposed to 
nature ; sympathy was as much a craving of 
man's soul, as food for his body ; action was 



58 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT 

always superior to philosophy, even as sane 
enthusiasm is always above philosophic indiffer- 
ence, and reasoned self-expression is, en somme, 
the end of each man's life — these are, in effect, 
some of the points of view he advances as requisite 
for his new Utopia. He did not win the prize 
which was declared to be, if somewhat discursive, 
at least full of sound philosophy. The winner was 
Denou, eight years older than Bonaparte, a man 
who subsequently played a prominent role as a 
politician and an intellectual on a lower stage than 
his vast contemporary. 

In 1793 Commandant Bonaparte, of the 12th 
Battery of La F^re, published at his own expense 
his Souper de Beaucaire, a discussion, between five 
typical representatives of the social body, which 
treated of the existing political situation in 
France, and with especial reference to the city of 
Marseilles, which then aspired, it would seem, to 
play in Europe the role which had once belonged 
to oligarchic Venice. That such a condition of 
affairs could exist, indicated clearly the inherent 
weakness of the French Government, and the 
military representative at the Beaucaire supper- 
table —Bonaparte, of course — goes on to show that 
France can be saved only by a vigorous policy 
which shall prove acceptable to the whole of the 
nation, provided it be able to assert itself and 
re-establish order everywhere — a policy in which 
the sword must be allowed to play a capital role, 
given the conditions of the day, suggests our 
pragmatical officer, as we might presume. This 



NAPOLEON'S LIBRARY 59 

pamphlet went the way of the majority of ecrits 
de circonstance ; it made no sensation in the 
world, and a day was to come when Napoleon 
could use bad language on his hypercritical and 
caustic brother Lucien reminding him of certain 
of the popular sentiments he then advanced. 

" Oubliez-le," he would shout at the mocking 
Lucien; "oubliez-le — forget it!"; and then goes 
on to lecture him on the virtue of gratitude 
among brothers. 

In concluding this chapter, we think it well 
to mention that the fallen Emperor's library 
at St Helena was bequeathed to the Duke of 
Reichstadt. It contained somewhat fewer than 
500 volumes, which, we may suppose, were the 
favourite works of the wonderful soldier —his 
" heart's library," to which the great disrated 
could turn at any time for recreation, forgetful- 
ness or consolation. The first masters of French 
literature were nearly all represented, for a part 
if not all of their masterpieces, and there lies not 
a little pathos in the fact that the works on which 
his youthful mind had fed at Brienne ever held the 
first place in his interest. Historical tomes were 
numerous, and among English books we find a 
translation of Gibbon, a translation of Paradise 
Lost and Hamilton's Memoirs of de Grammont. 
There is also a Bible in eight volumes and a 
history of Bonaparte as First Consul, in three 
volumes. These apart, it is History — History 
everywhere, the story of human action to which 
he was to contribute so vast a chronicle himself. 



60 THE IMPERIAL STUDENT 

At the death of the Duke of Reichstadt, in the 
third decade of the nineteenth century, all these 
volumes passed into the possession of the 
Emperors of Austria, and are now shelved in the 
vast Hofburg Library in Vienna in a special 
section devoted to the legend of this mighty 
adversary of the House of Habsburg. 



CHAPTER III 
THE IMPERIAL CRITIC 

Frenchmen and Corneille — Value of Napoleon's 
Criticism— His Literary Likes and Dislikes— His 
Opinion of Cor?ieille and Moliere—A Discussion of 
Tragedy —Napoleon and Raynouard— Concerning 
Voltaire-— A Reading by Talma— Napoleon and the 
Public Taste— Love and Tragedy —A Literary Ghost 
— The Emperors Criticism of the JSjieid, Book IL — 
His Opinion of the Iliad— Dislike of Shakespeare— 
A Hypercritical View 



FRENCHMEN are agreed, we think, in 
assigning to Corneille the place which 
EngHshmen give to Shakespeare, or 
Germans to Goethe ; and, as every school- 
boy knows, in France, England and Germany, 
there may be found large bodies of opinion 
which, excluding all possible competitors, home 
or foreign, accord their champion, as against 
the rest of the world's illuminati, a position 
corresponding to that which certain theological 
universities are wont to confer on their most 
distinguished scholar — namely, the degree of 
Solus. Although we prefer to leave to profounder 
judges of the literary arts all decisions in matters 
of this nature, and though far from accepting the 
literary criticism of the great soldier as possessing 
much value beyond that of an extraordinary 
judge of human nature and human motives, we 
maintain, nevertheless, that the judgments of so 
important a student as Napoleon may always 
be placed with, at least, corrective results beside 
those of really competent professional critical 
judges, and competent critics, it may be said, are 
nearly as rare as Napoleons. As he has assured 
us himself. Napoleon was no great admirer of 
Shakespeare ; his regard for Goethe we have 
dwelt upon in another chapter, and shown that 
it was based partly on the psychological study of 
Werther and partly on the second-hand opinions, 
given to him by Talleyrand, by Lannes and by 
other men of purely political affairs, regarding the 
tremendous prestige that the Sage of Weimar 

62 



SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 63 

enjoyed among the conservative elements of 
Germany, which then, as now, made the most 
of its chosen literary instruments. 

Shakespeare, said Napoleon, in effect, would 
never have enjoyed the universal renown which 
was his, had it not been that Voltaire, an exile 
in England desirous of flattering Englishmen, 
introduced the study of the English dramatist 
to Frenchmen. Hamlet, the exile boasted, he 
only saw played once in his life, Macbeth twice, 
Othello once, and what he had seen of Shakespeare 
had not encouraged him to further study of the 
English style of drama. On the other hand, 
he had seen Le Cid eight times, Polyeucte six 
times, Cinna twelve times, CEdipe nine times. 
The English dramatist he considered to be lacking 
in political insight and to possess a genius which 
was more applicable to the study of bourgeois 
or provincial situations and conditions than 
adapted for intrigues enacted on a grand and 
imposing plane, and held that the colonising 
gifts of the British, by spreading the English 
language, had done more towards universalising 
the Bard of Avon than any intrinsical genius 
shown by his works. 

" Corneille was, on the contrary," said 
Napoleon, " at the supreme head of all the 
tragical poets of all time. He had divined the 
real nature of politics, and had he been trained 
to affairs, would have made a great statesman. 
It is not his versification that I admire most, but 
his great sense of actualities, his vast knowledge 



64 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC 

of the human heart, the profundity of his poUtieal 
nous. France owes to the sentiments which he 
has voiced many glorious results. The fatalism 
of the ancients Corneille has replaced by the 
reasoned philosophy of State-politics, and he 
is the only one among the poets of France who 
has seized upon this truth. Had he lived in my 
time I would have created him a prince." So 
enthusiastic, indeed, was the Emperor for the 
great French poet that at one time he expressed 
his intention of ennobling the living descendants 
of Corneille and of granting them suitable pensions 
for the maintenance of their dignity. 

Of Moliere's comedies he was no great admirer, 
since tragedy, in his opinion, was the only form 
of the drama which had a really educative value, 
or any inspiration worthy of the name. Tartuffe, 
he admitted, however, to be one of the master- 
pieces of the stage, yet a piece for which he would 
not himself have granted a theatrical licence, 
owing to the way in which it ridiculed devotional 
piety. Racine he esteemed very highly, and had 
witnessed Bajazet seven times, Iphigenie ten 
times, and Phedre on an equal number of occa- 
sions. Mithridate, in respect of its famous plan 
of campaign, he declared to be worthless, although 
as a work of art this drama appealed to him, 
Racine representing, in his view, on the whole, 
the somewhat " easy-going philanthropism " of 
the latter half of the seventeenth century. 

Raynouard's Templiers he witnessed three times, 
and disapproving of it for political reasons, com- 



NAPOLEON OBJECTS 65 

manded the author to come to the Tuileries in 
order to discuss Tragedy with him. The char- 
acter of King Phihppe-le-Bel, in this piece, had, 
it may be said, been depreciated, although in the 
opinion of the Emperor he had been a good King 
and France had not been too rich in good 
monarchs. He had, said Napoleon, been the 
first to put the Pope in his place, and had worked 
for the people in his attempt to destroy the Order 
of the Templars — composed mainly of younger 
sons and possessing the third of the kingdom's 
wealth — which had ceased to possess any utili- 
tarian value, but had become dangerous to 
the State. The Emperor's conversation with 
Raynouard throws an interesting light upon his 
conception of the drama. 

" You should have represented the King," said 
Napoleon, " in the act of declaring to a Council 
of his Ministers that he intended to abolish the 
Order. The Grand Master would then refuse to 
dissolve the Brotherhood and Philippe would 
finally be compelled to sentence him to death." 

" My conception," replied Raynouard, " was 
to make the King a weak character in order to 
enhance the dramatic situation by leaving the 
spectator in doubt whether the King would prove 
harsh or merciful to the Order — whether he would 
suppress it, or not." 

" But," objects the Emperor, " the King in 
this case represents the nation, and the nation 
is opposed to the Templars, who are a band of 
oligarchs working for their own interest and 



66 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC 

against that of the people. The latter must, 
therefore, be on the side of their real representa- 
tive — the King. Your correct dramatic situa- 
tion would have been to show Philippe bringing 
about a magnificent and spectacular coup d'etat 
by abolishing a veritable imperium in imperio. 
A King of France can be put on the stage only 
to be admired. Again, you must get this point 
into your head — namely, that Politics plays in 
modern drama the role that Fate played in the 
drama of the Ancients." 

And the Emperor goes on to show where the 
poet's technique fails in the following lines 
which Philippe addresses to the rebellious Grand 
Master : — 

" Choose between my clemency and my hatred — 
The scaffold awaits you ! " 

" That," cries Napoleon, " is altogether wrong ! 
A King does not talk of his hatred, but of his 
justice. He may consign to the scaffold, but 
never talks of one." 

On the subject of Brutus, the work of Voltaire, 
whose style the Emperor declared to be full of 
turgidity and tinsel {de boursouflure et de clin- 
quant) and whose temperament was incapable of 
understanding men and matters, or the move- 
ment of the passions. Napoleon said : 

" The Romans were guided by the love of their 
country, just as we are by our honour. Now, 
Voltaire does not depict the true sublimity of 
Brutus sacrificing his children, despite his own 



DISLIKE OF VOLTAIRE 67 

agony, for the safety of Rome ; he makes of him 
a monster of pride sacrificing them at a great 
crisis solely to the glorification of his own name. 
The whole tragedy is of a kind, and Lucretia 
becomes a madwoman who almost glories in 
the seduction which must make the ages talk of 
her." 

And of the same author's Mahomet he tells us 
that the Prophet is nothing better than an im- 
postor who might have been brought up at the 
Ecole Poly technique ; he is made to murder his 
father — an entirely wrong idea, says Napoleon, 
who adds that really great men are never 
cruel without necessity. Altogether Voltaire's 
Mahomet is too little for Napoleon, who gives 
instructions on one occasion to Monsieur de 
Fontanes saying : 

" / will reconstruct the plays and you can 
look after the versification." 

Legouve was another dramatist who came under 
Imperial criticism, when his Death of Henri IV. 
was submitted to the Censor. Talma was com- 
manded to read the play and the Imperial family, 
including Josephine, was present for the occasion. 
A line sonorously declaimed by the great tragedic 
actor aw^akens the Imperial ire. It runs : 

"Je tremble — je ne sais quel noir pressentiment. . . ." 

This is too much for Napoleon's conception of 
kingliness ; he interrupts Talma at once, declar- 
ing that the phrasing must be altered : 

" A King may tremble," he explains, " since 



68 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC 

he is a man like other men ; but he should never 
admit it." 

The words are accordingly changed and Talma 
goes on to describe how some bloody villain 
creeps forward and plunges ten inches of dagger 
into the royal chest. 

" Le pauvre homme ! L'excellent homme ! " 
cries Napoleon, with obvious after-thoughts, 
while poor Josephine, tres emue, turns on the 
opportune tear. 

A certain Nicolo Buonaparte, a resident of 
Florence, wrote a comedy in 1568, called La 
Vedova (The Widow), and Napoleon, with praise- 
worthy family pride, wished to have the play 
translated and produced in Paris in his day. It 
was found, however, that the work was far too 
indecent even for that age, and accordingly was 
not acted. Nevertheless, Napoleon made few 
mistakes in his judgments as to what the public 
really wanted, and the views of the people, 
dramatists always admitted, in nearly all cases 
coincided with those of the Emperor, a fact which 
may recommend itself to many psychologists of 
History, who tell us, with considerable cogency, 
that the great leaders of any epoch are almost 
invariably men who constitute in themselves a 
kind of resume of the mentality and tempera- 
mentality of the age in which they live. Arnault 
once read his Dom Pedro, or The Prince and the 
Peasant, to the Emperor, who was far from 
charmed to hear an agricultural labourer giving 
counsel to a sovereign. 



A LITERARY GHOST 69 

" Your peasant is a tribune of the Plebs," he 
told the author, " and I don't care for him." 
So, too, thought the first-nighters, who hissed 
the piece rather severely on its presentation. It 
was the opinion of the Corsican that Corneille 
alone knew how to make kings act and talk, 
verse being only the embroidery of the dramatic 
stuff, as he expressed it in his excellent native 
mother-wit. To Baour-Lormian, who had written 
a tragedy called Mahomet II,, Napoleon, dislik- 
ing the piece, declared that love scenes were of 
no use in tragical pieces, and that the serious 
dramatist should rely on history rather than 
on romance for his effects. What the author 
wanted was large conceptions ; the word-painting 
and the ringing phrase could wait. 

We must not overlook the tradition that 
Napoleon was himself the composer of a tragedy 
called Hector, the authorship of which was said 
to have been officially attributed to an alleged 
literary ghost, Luce de Lancival. This gentle- 
man, who had already written several plays, was 
without apparent reason one day given the 
Legion of Honour and a pension worth £300 
a year. Some obscure pamphleteer sought in a 
publication to show that Lancival's Hector was 
really the work of Bonaparte himself, who had 
once wiled away the empty hours of his incar- 
ceration in the Temple, many years before, in 
composing this tragedy. On attaining to supreme 
power he resurrected his lucubration, confiding 
it to Lancival for alterations and repairs. The 



70 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC 

dramatist did all that was required of him, 
tenderly edited Hector and submitted it, in his 
own name, to the Theatre Fran9ais, where it was 
swiftly turned down with Homeric honours. A 
few days afterwards, during a rehearsal, an aide- 
de-camp arrived at the theatre with the following 
letter addressed to the director : — 

" The mummers (histrions) of the Theatre 
Fran9ais will immediately start rehearsing the 
tragedy Hector, which they had the audacity and 
ill-taste to refuse. Signed : Nap." When we 
have added that the above story appears in a 
pamphlet entitled, Bonaparte, his Family and his 
Court, by a Chamberlain malgre lui, we think the 
credibility of this pamphleteer becomes a little 
more than suspect. 

Brother Scots will be interested to hear that a 
play entitled Edward in Scotland, by Alexander 
Duval, was enacted in 1802, and the audience 
much applauded a scene in which the Pretender 
retorts to an English colonel, who proposes as a 
toast the death of all who support the Stuarts : 
" I drink the death of no man," says Charles 
James, and the public applauded, thinking of the 
exiled Bourbons, no doubt. Bonaparte went to 
see the play and Duval affects to think that the 
First Consul shed a tear over the sufferings of the 
poor Stuart exile ! Bourbon partisans who were 
present, like the Due de Choiseul, took every 
available opportunity of making demonstrations, 
and Bonaparte had the play withdrawn. Some 
indication of the political temper of those days 



VIRGIL EXAMINED 71 

is also shown in the extra-theatrical comedy 
which attended on the representation of a play 
called VAntichamhre, by Dupaty, in which the 
Consular court comes in for considerable ridicule, 
Bonaparte himself being mimicked, as well as 
members of his family. In his first anger 
the Consul sentenced the author to exile in San 
Domingo, but pardoned him as he was taking 
ship at Brest for the West Indies. 

The Imperial critic on one occasion dehvered 
his opinion of Virgil in the following words : — 

*' The Second Book of the ^neid is held to be the 
masterpiece of this epic, and it certainly deserves 
the reputation, considered from the point of style. 
I cannot, however, rate it very high from other 
points of view. Thus, the wooden horse may 
have been a popular tradition, but to introduce 
it into an epic poem is ridiculous and entirely 
unworthy of a grandiose theme. You will find 
nothing like this in the Iliad, where everything 
conforms strictly and truthfully to the real 
practice of war. How can we imagine the 
Trojans so stupid as not to have thought of send- 
ing a fishing-smack to the island of Tenedos, in 
sight of Troy, in order to assure themselves if 
the thousand ships of the Greeks had reached 
there, or if they were on their way to attack the 
city ? How can we believe that Ulysses and his 
friends were such fools as to risk putting them- 
selves into the hands of their enemies by cribbing 
themselves in that ridiculous wooden machine ? 
And supposing the horse to have contained even 



72 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC 

one hundred armed men — how could such a 
weight have been moved to the walls of Troy, 
across the bay and over two rivers which were 
overlooked by the very towers of the citadel ? 

" The tragic episode of the sons of Laokoon, 
however impressive, cannot excuse the absurdity 
of the narrative, which really shows that the 
destruction of Troy and the entire action of the 
Second Book were executed and accomplished 
within the space of a few hours — an achievement 
which must in practice have required at least a 
fortnight. Had Homer described the fall of 
Troy he would not have treated it simply as 
one treats the taking of a fort. Homer had 
seen war, whilst Virgil had simply thought out 
his ideas of war like a schoolmaster who knows 
his book. It took Scipio seventeen days to raze 
Carthage to the ground ; and Moscow was burned 
out only after eleven had passed. The Third 
Book is but a copy of the Odyssey, while the 
Fourth lacks every agreement with the dramatic 
unities. 

" The Iliad," said Napoleon, " is like Genesis 
and the Bible, and is for all time. Homer was 
at once a poet, an orator, an historian, a legislator, 
a geographer and a theologian. He is the 
Encyclopsedist of his epoch. The universal 
approval which men have given him has been 
well won and I have always read him with 
enthusiasm. A contrast which much struck me 
in Homer was the coarseness of social habits and 
the ethical grandeur of ideas — heroes hunting 



THE BARD OF AVON 73 

game and dressing their own food, yet moving 
worlds to vast endeavour with their eloquence." 

And here finally is what the Emperor had 
to say of the Bard of Avon, whom he had 
read, we imagine, only through the medium of 
translations : 

" Certain French people fall in love with 
England at first sight, and are willing to accept 
one single opinion as sufficing to settle finally 
the matter of England's literary glory. But 
Shakespeare was forgotten for two centuries even 
in England. It pleased Voltaire, then in Geneva 
and seeing much English society at the time, 
to praise the English poet in order to flatter his 
great friends from London. It became the fashion 
to call Shakespeare the greatest writer of all 
time. I have read Shakespeare, however, and 
can say that there is nothing in him which 
approaches either Corneille or Racine. It is 
impossible indeed to read his plays seriously. 
Myself I find them so feeble as to be almost 
pitiful. As for Milton, there is only his address 
to the Sun and a few other pieces which count 
for anything ; the rest is mere rhapsody. And 
I much prefer Vely to Hume. France has no 
cause to envy England for anything ; even 
her own citizens desert her as soon as they 
can." 

Napoleon once objected to La Fontaine's famous 
fable of the Wolf and the Lamb on the ground 
that it taught might to be greater than right, 
and was consequently bad for children. It was 



74 THE IMPERIAL CRITIC 

immoral, he further held, because the wolf was 
not choked when he devoured the lamb ! 

In History he stood out for Machiavelli, saying : 
" Tacitus wrote novels, Gibbon is a brawler. 
Machiavelli is the only historian worth reading." 



CHAPTER IV 
THE IMPERIAL THEATRE 



Talma and Bonaparte — The Actor coaches the First 
Consul — The Emperor coaches the Actor — Friendlij 
Relations of the Twain — Napoleon on Critics and 
his Love for Cinna — Co?icerning Mademoiselle Mars 
and her Sister — An Unexpected Scene — Mademoiselle 
Bourgoin and Chaptal — An Imperial Rebuke 



IT is unfortunate that Talma, the Kean 
of the French stage, should have left us 
next to nothing in the way of records 
dealing with his long and uninterrupted 
intimacy with Napoleon whom he had known 
in the days which followed on the Toulon 
episode, when the young Corsican was an un- 
employed ex-commandant in Paris. There are 
letters extant — suspect, it must be added — in 
which the poor officer writes to the affluent and 
friendly actor, asking him if he has a few dollars 
{ecus) at his disposal, and it is to Talma, we think, 
that young Bonaparte confessed that he had once 
put his watch in pawn for a couple of pieces of 
gold. Of all the celebrities on the stage of that 
period. Talma alone enjoyed an intimacy with 
Napoleon, which came near to that possessed by 
Duroc, the Earl Marshal of the Empire, and the 
only individual to whom the Corsican allowed 
the privilege of free brotherly speech with him- 
self. The Emperor at St Helena gave the dis- 
claimer to the many stories which charged him 
with having been a bad borrower, when he said 
that he and Talma only became acquainted in 
1800. Talma also denied the suggestions. Others 
assert that they had known each other since 
1790. 

Whatever the facts, and they are not of very 
great importance, there is no doubt that in 1802 
Talma began to pay very frequent visits to the 
First Consul, in the course of which, it is said, the 
great actor used to give the chief of the State 

76 




TALMA AS NERO 

From an engraz>iuii 



THE SCHOOL FOR KINGS 77 

lessons in princely deportment, a course of in- 
struction the real significance of which could not 
have escaped the astute Frenchman. Admirers 
of Bonaparte who attributed all god-Hke gifts to 
their hero, denied that the Corsican had ever 
sought instruction from an actor how to play the 
monarch, and if the lessons were ever given, it is 
to be feared that Napoleon was no very apt pupil, 
since sound tradition has it that he was the least 
graceful or imposing of princes in respect of 
presence and courtly bearing. Nor can it be said 
that Napoleon derived much benefit from Talma's 
lessons in elocution, for, to the end, the great 
soldier, whatever he may have been in private, 
or in the council chamber, was a failure as a public 
speaker — except on the eve of conflict. That the 
Corsican really took lessons in deportment and 
elocution from his great contemporary is, how- 
ever, our own fixed belief, and we see; no reason 
either for refusing to believe the fact or for 
holding Napoleon up to ridicule on this account. 
We have noted that, like the admirably thorough 
being he ever was, Bonaparte had studied out the 
essential character and personality of princes ; 
and it is more than likely that he did not confine 
his study to learning only the half of his role. 

On his own side, Napoleon was very free with 
instructions to the great tragedian. For example, 
after seeing Talma in the Death of Pompey in 
1805, the Emperor — ^who had really been an 
emperor since 1800 and cannot be accused of too 
much anxiety to show his sense of the new honour 



78 THE IMPERIAL THEATRE 

— addressed the actor as to his role in the 
following terms : — 

" You work your arms too freely and are too 
full of gesture. The head of an empire is more 
economical of his movements ; he is fully aware 
that a sign is an order, that a look means death, 
and is therefore sparing of both. There is also 
in the play a verse the meaning of which escapes 
you, Talma, who seem to be too convinced, too 
sincere when you declaim the line : 

" ' For me, who think a throne to be an infamy . . .' 

" Caesar, when he speaks these words, does not 
mean the least of them, and talks in this strain 
only because he is surrounded by Romans to 
whom he wishes to convey the idea that he has 
a horror of kings. He is, however, far from 
thinking the throne contemptible. On the con- 
trary, it is the first object of his whole life. You 
must not make a Caesar talk as a Brutus would 
talk." 

Again, after witnessing Britannicus, Napoleon 
criticises Talma in the following words : — 

" Your acting of Nero does not quite satisfy 
me, and in that role I should like to see more of 
the conflict between a bad character and a good 
education. You should make fewer gestures ; a 
nature like Nero's has little external show, being 
too self-centred. Nevertheless, I Hke the simple 
and natural forms which you have restored to 
tragedy. When men of exalted rank are moved 
by passion, their language becomes more energetic 



TALMA AT COURT 79 

without being less natural. For example, you 
and I are now conversing in an ordinary way ; 
nevertheless we are making history." 

When the First Consul becomes Emperor, Talma 
fears to present himself at the Imperial Court 
until the new sovereign, noticing his continued 
absence, asks if the great actor is angry with him 
for any reason. After which Talma presents him- 
self and pleases Napoleon because he dresses in 
appropriate good taste for his courtly role. So 
Napoleon takes the opportunity of continuing his 
instructions to Talma, and we get the following 
monologue : — 

" Talma, you often visit me, and you can see 
things as they are : Princesses deprived of their 
lovers. Princes who have lost their States, Kings 
degraded by war from their sovereign rank, 
Generals who aspire to and beg for thrones. 
Around me you can see fallen ambitions, never- 
ceasing intrigues and rivalries, sorrows and afflic- 
tion — all covered with courtier-like maskery. 
Here, assuredly, is Tragedy enough for anyone ; 
my Palace is full of it, and even I am myself the 
most tragical figure in this big cast of tragedy. 
Well now ! Do you see any of us strike attitudes, 
or affect the airs and poses of grandeur, or hear 
us cry out in our triumphs or in our anguish ? 
No, indeed ! We are all perfectly natural and 
speak just as ordinary men speak when moved 
by interest or by passion. And it was in just the 
same way that the great makers of history acted 
in their own day and in the process of their own 



80 THE IMPERIAL THEATRE 

tragedies. There, now, you have something on 
which to meditate ! " 

All of which makes the reader rather sorry for 
the actor to whom Napoleon thought it necessary 
to address so crude a sermon of banalities— if he 
ever did ; and we very much doubt it. 

Talma once pretended to discern in the profile of 
Alexander the Great, as shown by a rare cameo, 
some resemblance to Napoleon— a likeness which 
certainly did not exist, if ancient coins tell the 
truth. The Emperor professed to be pleased and 
presented Talma with the cameo. Napoleon 
many times paid the great actor's debts — to a 
total amount, according to the Imperial account- 
books, of half-a- million francs, or £20,000. Cer- 
tainly Talma was never guilty of ingratitude to 
the Corsican. In view of the number of knight- 
hoods which have been distributed within later 
times to the various prominent actors and singers 
of our own age, by European sovereigns, it is 
interesting to learn from the Memoirs of Las Cases 
that Napoleon once declared it had been his 
intention to decorate Talma with the Legion of 
Honour, and that only the fear of a public outcry 
against such an official distinguishing of a mere 
actor caused him to alter his decision. It was 
from Talma that Bonaparte on his return from 
Italy to Paris purchased the hotel in the rue de 
la Victoire — formerly rue Chantereine — and it 
was in this house that the actor made up a list 
of entertainers whom he suggested the General 
should take with him to Egypt : Rigel, a pianist of 



THE r6LE of the CRITIC 81 

note ; Grandmaison, a poet ; Villoteau, a baritone 
— the type of male voice which Napoleon most 
favoured, we may state — and Arnault, a dramatic 
poet and author of Les Venetiens, who admitted 
that the Corsican had collaborated with him in 
the composition of that play. 

It was also to Talma, who had just presented 
his friend the poet Lemercier, that Bonaparte 
declared that criticism which was not con- 
structive was of no value whatsoever, since, as he 
said, a valet-de-chambre can find words for simple 
or gratuitous criticism. One of the visitors 
objected that the matter of good taste might 
possibly be beyond the intelligence of a menial, 
and Napoleon answered : 

" That is just another conventional term — 
good taste 1 What can the matter of good 
taste mean to a man who works on original lines 
as apart from novelty and the bizarre ? To me 
it is of the last concern what another person 
thinks, especially in accidentals. Give me sound 
argument and sound thought and I am with you. 
I have tried to read Virgil, but he bored me, and 
Ossian I read simply because, like the waves of the 
sea and the winds of the forest, he represented 
rough Nature to me. French dramatists and 
authors attach too much importance to what the 
critics are likely to say of them, and the result is, 
they are handicapped by the fact that, on starting 
to write, their own natural expression is already 
suffocated. A great author must write to please 
himself and without regard to standards which 



82 THE IMPERIAL THEATRE 

are only conventions set up by mediocrities who, 
possessing no bel essor, cannot get beyond the 
art-Hmitations by which they seek to fetter 
loftier spirits. That is why I place Corneille 
first among all French poetic dramatists ; he 
had seen nothing of the great world and worked 
far away from the madding crowd. Yet who can 
approach him when he excogitates the heart of a 
prince, or the soul of a leader of men and presents 
him on the stage ? Truth— the discovery of new 
truth — is originality, not novelty, not new affec- 
tations, not the setting-up of standards which 
come to-day and pass to-morrow. Human nature 
always remains the same ; there were no 
conventions in the Garden of Eden." 

To Constant, the great man's body servant, we 
owe the recollection that a volume of Corneille 
was always placed on the Emperor's table when 
a visit was paid by Talma, and Napoleon would 
open the tome at Cinna and frequently quote 
from that masterpiece the hnes : 

" Cesar, tu vas regner. Voici le jour auguste 
Oti le peuple remain pour toi toujours injuste." 

On another occasion Lemercier presented him 
with a copy of his play Agamemnon, which the 
Corsican criticised with great severity, declaring 
that it was entirely lacking in courtly sense. 

" Strophus has no business to reprove Clytem- 
nestra," he says. " Strophus is only a valet." 

Lemercier objects : " Strophus is a friend of 
Agamemnon ; he is a dethroned king." 



MADEMOISELLE MARS 83 

" Psha ! " returns the Imperial upstart; "at 
Court only the King counts. The rest are but so 
much valetry." 

In Voltaire's Merope, he objects also to the line : 

•' The first of all kings was a victorious soldier," 

and forbids Chaptal to allow that piece to be 
produced because, as he declared, the people had 
not intelligence sufficient to apprehend the real 
meaning latent in that truism. Said he : 

" For me the man who raises himself to a throne 
from nothing, is the first man of his age. It is 
no question of luck, but only merit, on the one 
hand and recognition of merit on the other." 

The relations of Napoleon with the two sisters 
called Mars are not very well established, though 
it is accepted as historical that on one occasion 
while in the company of the younger and more 
famous sister. Napoleon, at three o'clock in the 
morning, had his first epileptic stroke, the whole 
household, including the Imperial consort, being 
awakened to attend at the Emperor's bedside, 
where Josephine pretended to go into an hysterical 
fit at the sight of her hated rival, chasing the 
latter half-naked down the stairs to the entresol 
and threatening, according to the record, with 
much shrill vituperation, to " scratch her face," 
to "pull her hair," to "slit her nose"— all in 
the accepted style of the perfect lady who toils 
beneath the moon and sleeps beneath the sun. 

Mademoiselle Bourgoin was another who passed 
under the notice of Napoleon. This damsel 



84 THE IMPERIAL THEATRE 

was the paid mistress of Chaptal, who acted as 
Minister of the Interior at the time and was an 
intimate and frequent coUaborant of the Emperor. 
Bourgoin once received — very unexpectedly — 
her summons to attend on Caesar's pleasure, 
and on presenting herself near midnight at the 
Palace was shown direct to Napoleon's bed- 
room, where, to her consternation, she found 
Chaptal deep in statistical business with his 
Imperial master. Poor little Bourgoin, who 
misjudged the occasion, thought well to attempt 
a little coquetry on her own account, all the more 
so since Napoleon had not even turned his head 
to look at her. As she sought to attract his 
attention, the Emperor, without raising his head 
from the table, ordered her to — ^undress! The 
chorus-woman set about divesting and laid her- 
self on the Imperial couch. Napoleon then made 
some pretence at finishing up for the night and 
retiring, whereat (says the chronicler) old Chaptal, 
small wonder, began to sweat at every pore of 
his body. The Emperor changed his mind, 
however, and with his Minister started on some 
new task which lasted a couple of hours. In the 
meantime the actress lay blinking in bed, much 
mystified by proceedings in which she was entirely 
counted out, considerably hurt in her woman's 
pride, and wondering where on earth she was 
to come in — and when, and how. At last the 
girl attempted a remark, but had hardly opened 
her mouth when Napoleon interrupted her 
brusquely : 



MONSIEUR DE CHAPTAL 85 

"Get up and go home," he said. " I do not 
want you." And the seance closed. 

The authority for this story is Chaptal himself 
in his Memoirs ; nor does he fail to inform us 
that he sent in his resignation on the day following 
this studied and indeed cowardly outrage on the 
part of the Corsican, since the Minister was not in a 
position to defend himself. It is of Mademoiselle 
Bourgoin, by the way, that Napoleon at Erfurt 
made the remark to the Emperor Alexander : 

" Visit that woman and to-morrow all Europe 
will know what your physical proportions are 
from the ground up. Besides, I am concerned 
about your health " — an exquisite remark which 
carries its own commentary with it. 

When Mademoiselle Chameroi, a well-known 
dancing-woman at the Opera, passed to her 
reward, the Vicar of Saint-Roch refused to receive 
her coffin in his church or to celebrate Mass for 
the repose of her soul. Napoleon immediately 
instructed the Archbishop of Paris to suspend 
the Vicar for three months in order, as he said, 
to give him time to meditate on the fact that 
Jesus Christ had taught men to pray for poor 
sinners, and to cultivate the divine attribute of 
charity to all. 



CHAPTER V 
MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 



Standards of Beauty — Lessings View — George an 
Amazonian Type — Her Attraction for Bonaparte — 
Their First Meeting at Saint-Cloud — Affected Nervous- 
ness of the Actress — Napoleon as a Lover — Espionage 
of Talleyrand — Bonaparte criticises the Actress — His 
Ge?ierosity to George — A Visit to the Tuileries — 
Josephine' s Fit of Jealousy — Napoleon s Coronation — 
George visits an Emperor — Napoleon and His Bonnes 
Fortunes — Where George disappointed her Lover — 
Her Veneration for Napoleon — A Costly Rendezvous 



IF the author of the Laocoon was right, 
then we may readily agree that there are 
certain subjects that do not altogether 
lend themselves to the painter's art. When 
Helen raised her veil and thought that act a 
sufficient answer to the angry Senators who 
accused her of having brought calamity and de- 
vastation upon Troy, the lady showed that the 
opinion she entertained about her own beauty 
was not a poor one. But could the first of 
painters present the most easily satisfied among 
us with the picture of a Helen who might be 
admitted to be worth a ten-year war, or show us 
a beauty the very absoluteness of which must 
appeal to all tastes ? Assuredly not ; and we 
should ourselves prefer the poet to tell us of this 
miracle of loveliness, leaving it to the reader's 
imagination to conjure up the ideal of so fair 
a creature — although Lessing teaches otherwise. 
Portraiture has of course dealt, though not 
generously, with Mademoiselle George — correctly 
so spelled — a favourite mistress of Napoleon, and 
on contemplating various pictures which represent 
this actress, we are led to believe either that the 
Corsican's taste was poor, or else that the por- 
traitists of that time were weak in reproducing 
their sitters. As represented by the various 
artists whom we have seen, George would seem 
to have resembled one of those handsome but 
hard-faced Irishwomen of the larger size, and the 
reader may not require to be told that certain 
profound experts in the anthropological science 

85 



MARGUERITE-JOSEPHINE 89 

have seriously questioned the absolute femininity 
of the woman of Ireland, the theory being that she 
suffers from an excess of masculine temperament. 
Like the majority of women who have attained 
to lofty rank in the dramatic and singing pro- 
fession, Mademoiselle George was born of actors 
and made her first appearance on the stage at 
five years old — about 1790. At the opening of 
the Consulate she was in her twenty-second year, 
and already possessed an important prestige 
among contemporary actresses — a prestige which 
was mainly due then, as it is now and ever was, 
to cleverly organised reclame or press-agency 
work. Her vogue among the stage-door brother- 
hood was great — much greater than she admits 
in her Memoirs — and it is to be feared, alas ! that 
Marguerite-Josephine, to name her, had dropped 
the pitcher very early in life. When Bonaparte 
first met her she was the mistress-in-chief 
of a certain Prince Sapieha, and although she 
emphasises the fact that a maiden aunt used 
to look very carefully after her morals, there is 
valid ground for the presumption that this old 
virgin was herself really no better than she 
should have been. The First Consul first saw 
George as Clytemnestra in Iphigenia, and so 
pleased was he with the personality and perform- 
ance of the young actress that he sent Constant 
— his valet! — to her house, after the play, with 
instructions to solicit her to call at Saint-Cloud on 
the following night — a fair sample of the Corsiean's 
diplomacy in delicate matters of the kind* 



90 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

George, at this point in her Memoirs^ goes into 
a ridiculous description of her " emotions " on 
hearing from the body servant that the First 
Consul wished to meet her. We must respect 
the intelligence of the actress, however, when she 
tells us that her curiosity in regard to the young 
Conqueror overcame all other sentiments ; for the 
feeble brain of an ordinary stage-woman could 
not have thought out this little bit of soul- 
analysis if she had not really felt it. She informs 
Constant of her willingness to wait on the Consul 
at the hour indicated. Then, she says, the whole 
night preceding her visit was one long misery. 
What could the First Consul want with her, she 
wondered. And besides, could he not come 
to her ? Perhaps it would be better, after all, 
to write and decline, and then she tries to think 
what she ought to wear — white or pink ; a 
confection or something muslin and simple ? Oh, 
these dictators — ^what dreadful men they must 
be ! And at last she drops off to sleep. About 
eight o'clock her maid awakes her, and noting 
Mademoiselle's bad humour, assures her that other 
rivals on the stage — Volnais, Bourgoin, Mars — 
would much envy her when they heard of her 
good fortune. George, somewhat consoled, orders 
her carriage for the Bois, visits her coiffeur, her 
tailor and goes on to the theatre, where she 
meets Talma — mon hon Talma. The actor and 
the manager, Fleury, both congratulate her, the 
latter with some narquoiserie, assuring her that 
she wears an air of conquest. 



THE WAY TO SAINT-CLOUD 91 

The actress goes home and arrays herself in 
what she describes as a white muslin neglige , 
a lace veil and a cachemire, and on arriving at the 
theatre, to wile the intervening hours away, 
meets the actress Volnais, who is also out for a 
rendezvous, 

" Do you intend to see the whole play out ? " 
says the latter, referring to the fashionable piece 
then being acted. 

" No — ^will you ? " asks George. 

" Nor I," repHes Volnais, " I have something 
on about nine o'clock " — meaning presumably 
that she was to meet General Junot, for the 
rendezvous was with him. 

The Consular carriage called for George at 
eight o'clock, with Constant, the valet, in attend- 
ance, and the coachman was the famous Cesar, 
about whom so many obvious jokes used to be 
made. It is a long journey to Saint-Cloud — 
four miles ? — and Constant, under no illusions, 
presumably, as to the quality of this hardened 
actress's "trepidation," laughed when she told 
him that she felt very much humiliated — " which 
I thought somewhat impertinent on his part," 
writes the lady. On arrival at the Palace, 
Roustan shows her into — a large bedroom. As 
she nurses her nervousness, the First Consul makes 
his appearance — in white breeches, black socks, 
green uniform with red facings and the famous hat 
crushed under his arm. His first act was to tear 
her veil away and tell her that he had sent her 
£120 after hearing her in some recent play. 



92 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

" I thought," said he, " that you might have 
come in person to thank me. But evidently 
you are proud as you are fair." 

At this point the actress complains that the 
lights are too many for her, and Bonaparte 
summons Roustan to put most of them out, after 
which, as is usual with him, he wants to know 
all about her. George tells the story and does 
not conceal her relations with Prince Sapieha. 
The First Consul extracts a promise that she will 
visit himself occasionally. 

" He certainly was pleased with me," writes 
George, " if he was not quite in love," adding 
simply ; "I begged off on this occasion, but 
promised faithfully that I would return. He put 
on my veil for me and then kissed me on the 
forehead, at which I began to laugh, telling him 
he had kissed a present given me by Sapieha, 
whereupon he tore the veil into a thousand 
shreds and trampled on my shawl, took the ring 
from my finger, crushing it beneath his heel and 
even pulling off a little chain I wore. Then he 
summoned Roustan, ordering him to fetch a new 
veil and a shawl and telling me I was to wear only 
what he gave me." 

This was the first interview with the First 
Consul, and Constant took the actress home 
again. In the course of the next day, Talma 
called on her and, in answer to her hesitations, 
told the actress that she must be very foolish 
not to take advantage of her good fortune. Like 
the good Frenchman he was, moreover^ the actop 



" ELECTRICITY OF LOVE " 93 

advised George, if she feared any embarrassments 
as a result of her Haison with Bonaparte, to get 
married right away. He persuaded her, in any 
case, to pay her promised visit to Bonaparte, and 
accordingly George returned to Saint-Cloud that 
night. 

On this occasion Bonaparte, according to the 
actress, took great pains to spare her all shock 
to her sense of what was proper, and indulged 
in sentimental comedy to the extent of asking 
the young actress if she was not conscious of the 
electricity of love ; finally putting the question : 
" Do you not love me a little ? " George assures 
the chief of the State that she loves him not a 
little, but that his role in life is so large that she 
can only count for a small item in its evolution, 
and that although he is First Consul, she cannot 
allow him to trifle with her. She reminds him 
that they are playing Cinna on the next day, and 
that consequently she must be home betimes 
in order to get a full night's rest. Bonaparte 
reluctr.ntly consents to her departure before (as 
he says) she has given him a proof of her willing- 
ness to be his friend, and insists that, Cinna 
over, his carriage shall take her back to Saint- 
Cloud, when he will expect her to sacrifice to 
Venus. 

" He dried my tears," says Georgina, who 
promised to keep the appointment for the next 
day and again returned home. 

Cinna was duly acted on the succeeding night, 
and Bonaparte was present. At the rendering of 



94 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

the famous line, declaimed by Emilia, the part 
taken by Mademoiselle George : 

" I have seduced Cinna and can seduce others," 

the actress came in for some enthusiastic applause, 
at which, she says, she became purple, fearing 
that the Consul might accuse her of having 
been indiscreet. He was, on the contrary, very 
kind when they met at Saint-Cloud, where Bona- 
parte kept her till seven in the morning, himself 
acting as her servant when it was time for the 
actress to go — even to the extent of helping to 
rearrange the bed in which they had lain. The 
lady did not see her lover for some days, and then 
they met by arrangement in the woods of Saint- 
Cloud, when Bonaparte compHmented her on 
looking so well by dayHght, at the same time con- 
fessing naively enough that so many women had 
deceived him by candle-light. For a considerable 
period, the actress deserted her Prince for the 
First Consul, and it does not appear that the 
former became disconsolate, for during the first 
fortnight of their liaison he made no particular 
inquiries about his fair Georgina. In the honey- 
moon of their connection, Bonaparte, the actress 
tells, showed the greatest delicacy in his dealings 
with her. He was at once "violent and tender" 
— to quote the hetaira — never omitted to make 
their bed in the morning, helping her even with 
her toilet, putting on her shoes, and "as I 
wore silver garters which buckled and were 



''TALLEYRAND, TRIPOTIER '* 95 

difficult to fix on, he had special garters ordered 
for me — of the elastic style." 

About this time, too, the ex-Bishop of Autun, 
Monsieur de Talleyrand, began to be somewhat 
troublesome to her, Mademoiselle George tells us, 
and used to advise her to receive twice a week 
a la grande mondaine. The actress assured her 
diplomatic mentor that she was quite satisfied 
with the society of artists and had no ambition 
to shine in a circle so much above her own. 
Monsieur de Talleyrand, according to Georgina, 
was a meddlesome person (tripotier), and it was 
very hard to penetrate his motives, which, in this 
case, probably aimed at nothing higher than 
espionage upon the First Consul, the diplomatist 
being willing to allow the actress a small social 
role in return for inside information. Georgina, 
who appears to have been sincerely attached to 
Bonaparte to the very end of her days, soon 
acquainted her lover with his Minister's advances, 
and the First Consul was puzzled. 

''What is that viper Talleyrand up to now?" 
he wonders. " He wants everyone to be as 
crooked as he is himself, and likes to make 
mischief everywhere. You are quite right to 
have nothing to do with society." 

Bonaparte then criticises some role of hers 
in which she plays her part without passion, 
and advises her, if she wants to learn what the 
sentiments of a mother are like, to become one. 
The actress tells us, too, that Bonaparte once sent 
her to a sage-femme in the Faubourg in order to 



96 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

learn from that worthy some of the secrets of 
maternity ! A few days before his departure for 
the new camp at Boulogne, they spend a night 
together, playing like two children on the hearth- 
rug before the fire. Bonaparte tells the actress 
of his approaching departure, and fearing that 
she may want for money during his absence, 
stuffs several handfuls of bank-notes down her 
corsage, the amount, says the actress, being for 
£1600. On his return from Boulogne she visits 
him at the Tuileries, where the Consul has a 
private apartment at the top of the Palace, 
looking out over the great city. On making her 
way up to this cabinet particulier, Georgina drops 
an overshoe and sends Constant to fetch it, 
which he does. The Consul appears and is as 
kind as ever, nor does he fail, says the actress, to 
help her to undress and to dress again, acting with 
his natural sense of order, like a trained femme 
de chambre. 

It was during one of the many visits of this 
actress to the First Consul that occurred the 
famous scene in which Madame de Remusat 
shows how jealous of her great husband Josephine 
could be at times. On one occasion — well after 
midnight — Madame Bonaparte, strong with an 
intuition that the First Consul was not quite 
alone in his small apartment on the floor above, 
aroused Madame de Remusat, her lady-of -honour, 
and with a lighted candle, the two women picked 
their way up the private staircase, Madame de 
Remusat thoroughly ashamed, she tells, of the 



ADVICE FROM MURAT 97 

role which she was forced to play. As the pair 
crept up the stairs, a slight movement was heard, 
and Josephine, seized with sudden fright, declares 
that it must be Roustan, the mameluke, a monster, 
she says, who is capable of killing them both at 
sight. This warning is quite enough for Madame 
de Remusat, who turns about without further 
parley, escaping back to their quarters ; her 
mistress soon follows, and both women burst out 
laughing at their own discomfiture. 

Shortly before the establishment of the Empire, 
Mademoiselle had to complain of the inattention 
of her great lover who, during one long fortnight, 
did not summon her to his Palace. Georgina 
thought that the liaison was drawing to its in- 
evitable end, and on visiting the theatre on the 
same occasion as Bonaparte, when she occupied 
the box opposite his, affected not to be aware of 
his presence. Murat, acting by instruction, we 
may imagine, paid her a visit during the last act, 
and taking advantage of her offer of a seat in her 
carriage, advised the actress, on the homeward 
journey, to call upon the First Consul as he had 
asked her to do. Georgina visits her patron, 
accordingly, and learns from his lips that he cannot 
see her for some time, but that he will always 
look after her interests. Talma assured her, on 
the day after this visit, that the Consul was to 
change his exalted rank for a still loftier one, and 
that it was reasonable policy on the part of the 
Emperor-elect to use circumspection ; besides, 
he added, Bonaparte was not the man to allow 



98 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

his love affairs to spoil his real role in the 
world. 

A few months afterwards Georgina, with her 
somewhat commonplace family, was an eye-witness 
of the Imperial procession to Notre Dame, 2nd 
December 1804. Cinna was to be staged by 
Imperial command, within ten days of the Corona- 
tion ; Georgina played her usual part of ^Emilia, and 
with great success. Not till five weeks had passed, 
however, was the actress to meet the Emperor, 
who received her with the same unaffected kindli- 
ness as in the old Consular days. Poor Georgina, 
unused to courts and with much of the naivete of 
the bourgeoisie in her conceptions of what was 
proper form, attempted a courtly role which did 
not please the master. 

" Stilted manners do not suit you, Georgina," 
said the simple soldier. " Be as you used to be — 
unaffected and frank." 

For all his studied plainness, the actress found, 
nevertheless, that the Emperor had displaced the 
Citoyen Consul, that the new style of drama 
seemed to her, she says, to be acted on a higher 
and more imposing plane, and Georgina quickly 
realised that she could never find happiness in 
such surroundings. Madame Duchatel, a lady- 
of-honour, in any case, soon attracted the 
Emperor's notice and Mademoiselle George only 
met her old lover at very rare intervals thereafter. 
Her relations with Napoleon lasted about two 
years in all, and it is fairly well established that 
the Corsican divided the favours of the actress 



NAPOLEON AND WOMEN 99 

with a considerable number of flaneurs of note 
in Paris. In all probability this fact revealed 
itself to the First Consul only after a lengthy 
acquaintance with Georgina, and accounted for 
the sudden enough rupture of the alliance. 

Frenchmen as a rule arc most hypercritical 
of each other in regard to what they call bonnes 
fortunes, and Voltaire has told us that they do 
not easily forgive any man his success among 
womankind. Accordingly, we may well believe 
that the young Conqueror of Italy soon became 
an object of the sarcasms of ordinary men, and 
more particularly on account of the fact that 
in the Consular period he was unusually thin 
and weakly-looking, while his height — actually 
five feet six and three-quarter inches, in English 
measurement, or about five feet three inches 
according to French standards — was poor among 
the existing race of Frenchmen, who were then of 
lofty stature, like their Gallic ancestors, and whose 
subsequent decrease in stature was due, in a large 
part, to the ravages caused by the Imperial wars 
among the manhood of France. In a capital 
which in those days — if we are to trust the writers 
— had raised cuckoldry to the proportions of a 
social art, we may be certain that the mistress of 
so great a man could not escape the aggressive 
attentions of men whose existence depended so 
largely on new sensations. It was among this 
peculiar race of beings that Napoleon earned the 
reputation of being a niais — where women were 
concerned. 



100 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

The Emperor, it would seem, objected in Made- 
moiselle George to two characteristics which, he 
very correctly said, showed that she came of a 
" race grossiere,^^ or common race — namely, her 
large hands and feet, and only overlooked these 
defects in consideration of other first-class quali- 
fications which she possessed for the role of 
hetaira. During their association the soldier gave 
his mistress many thousands of pounds, and even 
several years after the rupture, sent her a present 
of £400 on his name-day. The actress admits 
that he always paid her himself, sparing her the 
ordeal of calling on his banker, a fact which 
showed that Bonaparte possessed better taste in 
such matters than the late Marquis of Steyne. 
Although, in 1808, Georgina deserted Paris for 
Moscow, under circumstances which she recounts 
herself, Napoleon had her reinstated at the 
Comedie Fran^aise in 1813, and even had her paid 
the salary she had forfeited over a period of five 
years. 

During the Hundred Days, Georgina wrote to 
her old lover, offering to hand over to him certain 
letters which incriminated Fouche, and Napoleon 
sent a confidential man to fetch them, asking him 
on his return if the actress had complained about 
the state of her affairs. Georgina had not men- 
tioned that she was in poor circumstances. 
Nevertheless the Emperor sent her an order for 
£800 on his privy purse. To the very end the 
actress spoke well of the Corsican, but not as a 
woman talks of an old and favoured lover : rather 



Ki 





Y 



MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

After ait eii^ruviii}^ 



'' L'HOMME IMMENSE " 101 

as a favourite official might speak of a departed 
sovereign. She admitted that Napoleon saw in 
herself only the beautiful animal, and forgot her 
once she passed from his society. On her own 
side, she saw nothing in the Corsican but the demi- 
god, and the incarnate spirit of triumph ; least of 
all, the lover or the lovable. An English writer, 
treating of her relations with and her regard for 
Napoleon, expresses himself as follows : — 

''Up to the last George could never speak of 
Napoleon without a break in her voice — a thrill 
of genuine emotion. It was not her lover she re- 
called, but the great Emperor — Vhomme immense, 
as she called him, with real art. She spoke of 
him with timid reverence, and seemed to have 
forgotten that he had once thought her beautiful, 
and had told her so. This reticence was not the 
tardy modesty of old age, for she spoke freely of 
her other lovers — ^what a crowd of celebrities ! 
Talleyrand, Murat, Ouvrard, Lucien Bonaparte, 
King Jerome, the Emperor Alexander I., Prince 
Sapieha, Count Benckendorff, Prince Demidoff, 
Coster de Saint-Victor, Jules Janin, Alexandre 
Dumas, Tom Harel, and countless others. It 
was rather that she saw in him, not the part he 
had played to her, but the part he had played to 
France ; like those nymphs of old who, honoured 
by the embraces of a god, were so dazzled by the 
blinding light of his glory that they never even 
beheld his face." 

George has earned the reputation of having 
once given a favoured lover a rendezvous which 



102 MADEMOISELLE GEORGE 

proved the costliest on record. Here are the 
facts as retailed by one of the chroniclers : 

"Among the many celebrities on whom her 
charms made an impression was Ouvrard, the 
great Imperial financier and army contractor. 
Already under the Directory, Ouvrard's fetes at Le 
Raincy and then at Rueil, were the talk of Paris. 
Twice a week the corjps de ballet of the Opera were 
entertained ; an enormous white marble bath 
served for their ablutions, and each lady left with 
a present of fifty louis. George once cost him — 
as he himself related — £84,000 for a single visit. 
Ouvrard had invited her to sup at Rueil, but that 
very same evening Bonaparte had given her a 
rendezvous at Saint-Cloud, and she informed the 
financier that she would have to postpone her visit. 
Ouvrard was furious, and vowed he would not yield 
to a shrimp like Bonaparte, whom he had known 
as a poor Captain of Artillery, and who had been 
only too happy to be invited to his house in the 
early days of the Directory. So he insisted upon 
George coming to Rueil, adding as a postscript 
that she would ' find £4000 in the folds of her 
napkin ' at supper. She could not refuse this. 
The Consul would have to wait. So, pleading a 
sudden indisposition she was rapidly borne to 
Rueil in one of Ouvrard's carriages. The Emperor 
had his spies and heard of it. Ouvrard received 
a summons to appear forthwith at the Tuileries. 
Here he was promptly ushered into the Chief's 
presence. 

" * Monsieur, how much did you make out of 



AN ARMY CONTRACT 103 

your contract for the army at the beginning of 
the year ? ' Bonaparte demanded. 

*' The financier, knowing it was useless to He, 
replied : ' £160,000, Sire.' 

'' ' Then, sir, you made too much ; you will 
immediately pay £80,000 back into the Treasury. 
Bonjour, Monsieur ! ' " 



CHAPTER VI 
NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 



The Cult of Napoleon — Goethe on the Corsican — The 
Congress of Erfurt — Honouring the Sage — Lannes, 
Maret and Goethe — Presentation to the Emperor — 
Ecce Ho7no ! — The Emperor and Werther — Politics 
and Fate — Napoleoii s Manoeuvre — Miiller on the 
Interview — Talleyrand's Version of the Meeting — 
Preparations for Erfurt — An Imperial Opinion upon 
Athalie — Goethe and Dedication — Talleyrand on 
Napoleons Learning — Johann von Miiller — The 
Emperor on Christianity — Tragedy, the School of 
Kings — Wieland is presented — Les genres tranches 
— History and Romance — Wieland at the Palace — 
Tacitus and the Annals — Napoleons Opinion — Wie- 
land' s Eloquence — The Great Painter of Antiquity 
— Livy and Tacitus — The World's Happiest Age ? 



THOSE who hold that the cult of 
Napoleon is a certain indication of a 
shallow mind — and their number grows — 
must find themselves in some difficulty 
when they attempt to provide us with an apology 
for Goethe's ecstatic worship of the world's fore- 
most exponent of the strenuous life. 

*' Napoleon," said the German, " always lived 
in the ideal and nevertheless was not conscious of 
the fact ; he denied the ideal and refused to admit 
its reality, while all the time he sought with ardour 
to realise it. His reason, so lucid and incorrupt- 
ible, could not, however, perpetually support the 
essential contradiction involved, and his words 
are often of the highest import, as for example, 
when he describes an idea as a child of Reason ; 
or when he declares that each idea gives birth to 
another and that the influence of a fruitful idea 
can never die. Therefore, he declares, he himself 
must live, since he has given a new impulse 
and a new direction to the march of human 
progress." 

When the entire Continent was organising itself 
for the destruction of the mighty disturber of the 
peace of Europe, Goethe alone, of all the great 
literary spirits of Germany, openly expressed his 
grief that France, which he looked upon as his 
" second Fatherland," was about to be invaded 
by the gathering coalitions, and privately made 
no pretence at disguising his opinion that with the 
passing of Napoleon must also perish the active 
spirit of Liberty for some generations to come. 

io6 



HERR ECKERMANN 107 

His faithful house-friends, Miiller, the Chancellor, 
and Eckermann, the author, have also chronicled 
on many a page his veneration for the man of 
action. Eckermann on one occasion lamented 
that he had never seen Napoleon in person, and 
Goethe replied by telling the Schriftsteller that 
he had indeed missed a sight worth seeing. 

" Did he look like something ? " inquires the 
simple Eckermann, entirely in the style of the 
conversationists of Ollendorf's German Grammar, 

" He was something," replies Goethe pontific- 
ally, " and looked what he was." 

" Napoleon was the man ! " declares the 
German Sage another day. Das war ein Kerl — 
always enlightened, always clear and decided and 
endowed at every hour with sufficient energy to 
carry into effect whatever he considered advan- 
tageous and necessary. His life was the stride of 
a demi-god from battle to battle and from victory 
to victory. It might well be said of him that he 
was found in a state of continual enlightenment. 
On this account his destiny was more brilliant 
than any the world had seen before him, or perhaps 
will ever see after him." 

At this point in the conversation, Eckermann 
chronicles, Goethe poured him out a glass of 
wine, inviting him to help himself at the table; 
encouraged by which hospitality he fires off the 
following typical German sentiment at the poet : 

" Still it appears to me that Napoleon was 
especially in that state of continued enlighten- 
ment when he was young, and his powers were 



108 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

yet on the increase — ^when, indeed, we see at his 
side divine protection and a constant fortune. 
In later years, on the contrary, this enlighten- 
ment appears to have forsaken him, as well as his 
fortune and his good star." 

'"''Que voulez-vous ? '' returns Goethe, bursting 
into exotic French, " I did not write my Love- 
songs or my Werther a second time," and goes on 
ponderously to explain in effect to the voracious 
Eckermann that Napoleon was as great as he 
was simply because he was not less great than 
he might have been. And Eckermann swallows 
this pearl of wisdom, but wisely goes on cutting 
Brotschnitten, like Werther's lady, and does not 
contradict. 

" Napoleon," Goethe declares on another 
occasion, " had studied my Werther as a criminal 
judge studies his documents and in this spirit he 
discussed it with me " — a view which is hardly 
supported by extant records of the famous con- 
versation which took place on 2nd October 1808 
at Erfurt, whither, it will be remembered. Napoleon 
summoned a Congress of celebrities of all sorts, 
less with the object of really dealing with the 
political situation, we may suppose, than with 
the deliberate intention of summarising for 
posterity, in one impressive pageant, the signific- 
ance of his mighty march across the field of human 
action. 

Among the crowd of royal and princely person- 
ages whose presence at Erfurt was chronicled by 
the Moniteur, especial attention was given to the 



ECCE HOMO ! 109 

name of Monsieur de Goethe, who is paragraphed 
more generously than many a minor sovereign. 

" The Court of Weimar has brought us the cele- 
brated Goethe," writes the Paris paper's special 
correspondent. " A minister of the Duke of 
Weimar, this author is still young, although his 
reputation is of ancient date. He is an assiduous 
attendant at the theatre, where he has had an 
opportunity of seeing our actors in Andromache, 
Britannicus and Zaire,'''' 

Marshal Lannes had stayed at Goethe's house 
in 1806 and had conceived a great admiration for 
the German. On the latter's arrival at Erfurt, the 
famous soldier had hastened to pay his respects, 
and they subsequently saw much of each other. 
Goethe also made the acquaintance of the Minister 
Maret, on whom the German poet produced so 
profound an impression that he spoke of it to 
Napoleon. Goethe was accordingly summoned 
to the presence of the Emperor and made his 
appearance at the Imperial residence where, in an 
ante-chamber, he was presented to both Savary 
and Talleyrand. After some delay, the poet 
entered the presence. Napoleon was at breakfast, 
Talleyrand standing at his right and Daru to the 
left. 

" The Emperor makes me a sign to approach, 
and I advance to within a suitable distance," the 
poet tells us, " when Napoleon, having looked at 
me fixedly for a few moments, says, ' You are a 
man,' — ^whereupon I bow." 

Goethe, it is certain, was very proud of this 



110 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

peculiar expression of Napoleon's praise. A 
certain Graf von Reinhardt wrote to him in 
November of the same year, saying that people 
were discussing the phrase used by the Emperor, 
adding : "I can well believe Napoleon capable 
of feeling and speaking as he did." Goethe 
rephes to this letter in December, commenting 
on the Emperor's " wunderbares Wort," which 
he facetiously compares with the world-historic 
Ecce Homo! — adding that he is pleased with the 
Conqueror's good opinion of him. 

Having inquired as to his age and assured him 
that he carried his sixty years well. Napoleon 
turns the conversation to the subject of Werther, 
and cites a certain passage, asking the poet why 
he had worked out an idea which was opposed 
to truth and nature. After listening to a lengthy 
disquisition as to this detail, Goethe admits that 
the Emperor is perfectly right and that the passage 
is inconsistent with truth. Napoleon declares 
that the chief fault of the French Theatre is that 
it attaches no value to the necessity of keeping 
close to nature and truth. Voltaire's Mahomet he 
declares to be "a bad piece," because truth is 
sacrificed to the spectacular and to artifice, after 
which the Emperor goes into the minutest details, 
showing how a world-conqueror can only be re- 
presented faithfully as long as his role is played 
on a lofty and grandiose plane. In expatiating 
on this idea, he expressed his disapproval of all 
dramatic work in which Fate plays a capital role : 

" Such works," he declared, " belong to the 



DISPUTED PASSAGES 111 

obscure ages. And besides — ^what is meant by 
Fate ? Politics is Fate — la politique est lafatalite.'' 

Here Napoleon rose from the table and 
approached the poet. 

'' By a sort of manoeuvre,'' says Goethe, with 
a typically German lack of humour, " Napoleon 
separated me from the others and, turning his 
back on the company, began to question me on 
matters of personal interest to myself." 

And so the great soldier, who had shown the 
quality of his manoeuvres at the little affairs of 
Austerlitz and Jena, having given the man of 
Letters a kind of private show of his art, proceeds 
after his fashion to inquire if Goethe is married 
and what are his exact relations with the Grand- 
Ducal house of Weimar. 

Goethe, it may be observed, would never allow 
himself to be drawn into indicating the particular 
passage in Werther to which the Corsican had taken 
exception, as stated above, and to authorities 
who questioned him on the subject he was wont 
to return the tactful enough suggestion that as 
literary men, they were surely equal to the task of 
locating it. The Chancellor Miiller claimed, how- 
ever, to be in a position to solve a problem which, 
in Germany at least, has proved itself fruitful 
of endless and, indeed, purposeless discussion. 
Napoleon, according to Miiller, assured Goethe 
that he had read Werther seven times, and always 
with renewed pleasure. In order to confirm his 
words, he quoted abundantly and finished by 
blaming the poet for having made disappointed 



112 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

ambition, equally with his hopeless love for 
Charlotte, the motive which drove Werther to 
suicide. 

" That," says the Emperor, " is not true to 
nature, and you have weakened for the reader 
the idea which he had formed of Werther 's great 
love for Charlotte." 

There is no finality about this solution given 
by the Chancellor, it may be said. 

Talleyrand, in his Memoirs, gives another 
version of the interview at Erfurt, relating how 
Napoleon assured the officials that it was his 
intention to astonish Germany with his Imperial 
magnificence. And while discussing his pro- 
jected journey to Erfurt, he summoned M. Dazin- 
court, then director of his Imperial theatre, 
when the following dialogue took place : — 

" I want the Comedie Frangaise to come to 
Erfurt with me," says the Emperor. 

" For comedies or tragedies ? " inquires 
Dazincourt winningly. 

" For tragedies, of course," replies Napoleon 
testily. " Our comedies would be no good in 
Germany, where the French genius is not under- 
stood." 

'' Of course your Majesty will want everything 
on a very grand scale ? " suggests the director. 
" We could, for instance, give Athalie, Sire ! " 

" A fig for your Athalie ! " cries Napoleon 
irritably. " You certainly, Dazincourt, do not 
understand a man Hke myself. Do you think 
I am going to Erfurt to suggest the role of a 



CINNA'S APOLOGIA 113 

Joash to these Germans ? Athalie ! What a 
horrible idea ! But enough — tell your best tragic 
actors to prepare for a journey to Erfurt. Athalie, 
indeed ! How stupid these old fogies are ! " 
he adds, as Dazincourt bows himself out. " But 
it is really my own fault — ^I should not consult 
anyone. If he had even said Cinna, which is a 
truly good piece ! " And then he turns to 
Monsieur de Remusat, who is present, saying : 

" I was never much good at recitation ; but 
tell me, Remusat, does not the following passage 
occur in Cinna ? 

" ' Tous ces crimes d'Etat qu'on fait pour la couronne 
Le ciel nous en absout, alors qu'il nous la donne ? ' 

How do the next lines go ? Get a Corneille, 
Remusat." 

" Inutile, Sire,'' replies Remusat ; " I remember 
them," and goes on, French-fashion, to declaim : 

*' Et dans le rang sacre oti sa faveur I'a mis, 
Le passe devient juste et I'avenir permis. 
Qui peut y parvenir, ne peut etre coupable ; 
Quoi qu'il ait fait, ou fasse, il est inviolable." 

" Splendid ! " cries the Emperor, with en- 
thusiasm; "more particularly for those hard- 
headed Germans, who never change their ideas, 
and who still blether about the death of the Due 
d'Enghien : we must broaden their moral views, 
and the sentiments of Corneille are the proper 
sentiments for men with melancholy ideas, like 
the Germans. We must have Cinna for the first 



114 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

day, and you, Remusat, can look up tragedies for 
the other days. Of course, you will let me know 
before deciding on anything." 

According to Talleyrand, in his account of 
Goethe's interview, there is no mention of the 
phrase " vous etes un homme .' " ; and, by the same 
authority, Goethe does not allow Napoleon to 
overlook the claims to high literary rank of 
Lessing, Schiller, Wieland. The Emperor ex- 
presses a wish to meet the last-named, and advises 
the poet to study the plays which are being acted. 
Goethe tactfully evades the suggestion that he is 
the man to chronicle and describe for posterity 
the Congress of Erfurt, as the Corsican suggests, 
and declines to dedicate anything to the Emperor 
of Russia on the ground that when he first 
decided to devote himself to Letters, he also 
took the resolution never to dedicate a work 
to anyone, so as not to have to regret it, as he 
explained. 

" The great writers of the age of Louis XIV. 
were not like that," objects the Emperor rather 
coldly. 

" True," rephes Goethe, " but it is not so 
very certain that they never regretted their 
dedications." Which reply settles the matter. 

On Napoleon's making an inquiry about 
Kotzebue, the poet appeals for mercy for that 
unfortunate pamphleteer and patriot. The 
Emperor assures his visitor that he has no 
sympathy with men like Kotzebue. Goethe seeks 
to move him. 



A CAPTIOUS CRITIC 115 

"Adieu, Monsieur Goet'!" says the Corsican 
curtly, and draws the interview to a close. 

The selection of the tragedies presented at 
Erfurt had, says Talleyrand, been made with 
great care and much art. Each historical subject 
was made to point a political moral that applied 
to those spacious days. Thus, in Mithridates, 
the hatred of that Prince for Rome suggested 
Napoleon's hatred of Britain. The ideas of 
immortality, of greatness, of destiny, which run 
through Iphigenia, served only to emphasise the 
characteristics of the central figure of the Con- 
gress. In Voltaire's Mahomet, especial instruction 
had been given for the delivery of lines like the 
following : — 

'* Qui I'a fait roi ? Qui Ta couronne ? La Victoire ! " 

and : 

" Au nom de conquerant et de triomphateur, 
II veut joindre le nom de pacificateur." 

Talleyrand, who was a first-class hater, must 
be held suspect in what he says of coevals. 
There is so remarkable a coincidence, however, 
between his way of looking at Napoleon and that 
of de Bourrienne — a fidelity of detail in all matters 
which present the picture of the upstart, that we 
cannot refuse to look at what he has to say of 
Napoleon's pretensions to play the role of bel 
esprit. The Emperor, says the Prince, in effect, 
used to devote considerable time to " working 
up " recondite, or at least learned, conversational 



116 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

matter with which he surprised his company, when, 
the occasion being astutely chosen, he would 
spring it, impromptu-fashion, on some unprepared 
unfortunate. He never had before him the fear 
of a positive contradiction, since his exalted 
position always enabled him to choose the means 
of interrupting a conscientious objector to his 
opinions, and in foreign countries, especially, it 
was his habit to discuss matters which possessed 
a bearing and suggestion altogether outside the 
intellectual range of a miUtary man. 

Indeed, adds Talleyrand, the presence of a 
Montesquieu or a Voltaire would have had no 
terrors for Napoleon, whose self-assurance arose 
perhaps from vanity, perhaps from the splendour 
of his career. At Berlin in 1807, for instance, the 
Prince tells us how the victor of Friedland had 
addressed one of those intellectual omnivores 
whom Germany so frequently produces. His 
name was Johann von Miiller, and among his 
productions were a few trifles like a compre- 
hensive Bellum Cimbricum and a General History 
of the World, in twenty-four tomes. Napoleon 
requested him off-hand to fix the principal epochs 
of human thought and action, and, impatient of 
the historian's pause for consideration, set about 
doing so himself. Says Talleyrand : 

" I can still see the astonished face of Professor 
Miiller, as Napoleon went on to show how the 
rapid propagation and development of Christianity 
had caused a reaction of Greek ideals against 
those of Rome ; how cleverly Greece had adapted 



THE r6LE of tragedy 117 

herself to an intellectual role once her national 
political grandeur had passed — conquete qu'elle 
avail effectuee en saisissant ce germe bienfaiteur 
qui a eu tant d' influence sur Vhmnanite entiere " — 
meaning, of course, the triumph of Christianity 
over Pagan culture. 

" Napoleon must have learned this last phrase 
by heart," adds the sceptical Talleyrand, " for 
I heard him repeat it in exactly the same words to 
M. de Fontanes and also to M. Suard." 

" Philosophers," concluded Napoleon to Johann 
Miiller, " exhaust themselves in building up 
systems ; but they shall look in vain for a better 
philosophy than that of Christianity which has 
reconciled man with himself and his fellows and 
guaranteed order in all the world." A view 
which few men of good intent would be found 
to quarrel with, if only Christianity were what 
Christianity was meant to be. 
I Chancellor von Miiller — no relative of the late- 
mentioned — a kind of president of the High Court 
of Justice at Weimar, and a close friend and 
confidant of Goethe, adds a few more details 
concerning this historic interview. 

" Tragedy," said the Emperor, " is the school 
of kings and nations ; it is in some respects more 
important than history and by far the highest 
achievement of the poet. You, ^Monsieur Goet', 
ought to write a Death of Ccesar, but in a more 
grandiose and elevated style than that of 
Voltaire. Indeed, such a work might well become 
the central task of your life. In such a tragedy 



118 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

you would have to show the world how Caesar 
could have achieved the happiness of mankind if 
he had only been given the time to execute his 
mighty conceptions. Come to Paris, Monsieur 
Goet' ; I want you to come, and there you will 
not fail to see a vaster vision for your powers of 
observation, besides finding limitless treasure to 
draw upon for your poetical inspirations." 

And when the Sage had bowed himself out, the 
Emperor, Miiller tells us, turned to Berthier 
and Daru with the words : " That is a man ! " 
Goethe himself maintained a profound silence 
on all the incidents of the interview, and the 
Chancellor remained in doubt whether this was 
owing to his natural reserve or whether it was 
inspired by a feeling of delicacy and propriety, 
born of his perfect knowledge of the hypercritical 
society amidst which he lived. The invitation 
which Napoleon had given him to visit Paris 
engaged Goethe's consideration for a long time, 
and (says the Chancellor) he asked many questions 
about the customs of Paris, about the arrange- 
ments to be made, and only abandoned the idea 
on reflecting that so long and tedious a journey 
might prove too trying for his advanced age. 

" It was in the very last years of his life," 
concludes the Chancellor, " that Goethe gave me 
the details of his interview with Napoleon, and 
it was not till a few days before his death that I 
was able to induce him to give me permission 
to ampHfy the laconic fragments of his own 
Annals." 



LES GENRES TRANCHES 119 

The Imperial cortege in due course moved on 
to Weimar, where Miiller was able to present 
Wieland to the Conqueror. This luminary 
occupied in those days in Germany very much 
the same position that Voltaire had occupied in 
France of his age, and, indeed, on his presentation 
to the Emperor, Napoleon assured him that he 
was known in Paris as the Voltaire of Germany. 

'' Which of your writings do you like best ? " 
was the first question. 

" Sire," replied the simple scholar, " I attach 
no great value to any of my productions. I 
wrote according to my heart." 

" But," persisted Napoleon, "there must be one 
particular work to which you give preference over 
the rest." 

Wieland named his Agathon and Oberon, where- 
upon Napoleon went on to make his famous re- 
mark about genres tranches — a correct rendering 
of which phrase we prefer to leave to the literary 
connoisseurs. The great soldier objected, it seems, 
to Shakespeare's method, which "mixed tragedy 
with comedy, the impressive with the burlesque," 
and, turning to both Wieland and Goethe, said : 

" I am surprised that acute minds like yours 
do not cultivate a style tranche, or exclusive. 
Why, in your Agathon, Monsieur Wieland, do 
you indulge in that equivocal tendency to mix 
romance with history, and history with romance, 
since all work of this kind tends to cause con- 
fusion in the reader's mind ? I am aware," admits 
the Emperor graciously, " that I am fighting against 



120 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

great odds — all the more so because my remarks 
apply to Monsieur Goet' as well as to yourself." 

" Your Majesty may allow us to remark," 
replies Wieland, " that there are very few French 
tragedies that are not a mixture of history and 
romance. As regards my own work, I sought to 
instruct and so I needed the authority of history ; 
accordingly, I sweetened the pill of prolix learn- 
ing by mixing stern reality with the imaginative 
and the pleasing. Men's ideals are sometimes 
better than their actions, and romances which 
describe good men often describe them as better 
than they really are, I think. Compare, Sire, the 
Siecle de Louis XIV. with Telemaque, in which 
you will find the best lessons both for the governors 
and the governed." 

" I find," rejoins Napoleon, " that those who 
represent righteous men in fiction always end 
by proving that righteousness is only a chimaera. 
History indeed has suffered much in this respect 
from historians themselves." 

The conversation is interrupted here by M. de 
Nansouty, who announces the arrival of the courier 
from Paris. 

Wieland himself relates how on the occasion of 
a great gala reception at the Grand-Ducal palace, 
which he had not attended. Napoleon had a 
carriage especially sent for him, and the man of 
Letters, without delaying to change his ordinary 
attire, at once proceeded to the Palace. Here he 
arrived about eleven o'clock and was immediately 
taken to the presence of the Emperor, who, in 



TACITUS ATTACKED— 121 

consideration of the great author's seventy-five 
years, good-naturedly overlooked his skull-cap 
and slippers. For over an hour, Napoleon, in the 
presence of a motley group of celebrities, discussed 
the ancient classics with the old scholar, paying 
particular attention to Tacitus, and in con- 
nection with this academic rencontre, it is note- 
worthy that Talleyrand affects to believe that the 
Emperor had burned much midnight oil in prepar- 
ing his case against Wieland and the Roman. 
Tacitus, it may be remarked, is said by properly 
accredited authorities to be the first of the 
psychologists of history and a profound analyst 
of ulterior motives in political action. Accord- 
ingly, he found but little honour with the Corsican 
whose prejudice favoured the unquestioning spirit 
among the critics. 

" Tacitus," he said, " has taught me nothing. 
Can you point out a greater or a more unjust 
detractor of humanity ? In the simplest actions 
he finds criminal motives. All his emperors are 
monsters of iniquity inspired by different varieties 
of evil genius, and they were not at all bad judges 
who declared that the Annals are not so much a 
history of Rome as an abstract of its criminal 
records. Everywhere one is confronted with 
accusers and accused — men who commit suicide 
in the bathroom to escape punishment. Tacitus 
is always decrying the informers {delator es), yet 
w^here is a greater scandalmonger than himself ? 
And the style — one long night of obscurity ! I 
am no great Latinist myself, but the obscurity 



122 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

of Tacitus is quite obvious to me in the ten or 
twelve Italian or French translations which I 
have read, and I have come to the conclusion 
that this lack of clearness in his style arose from 
sheer inability to see things as they really were. 
I have heard him praised because he has inspired 
tyrants with fear. He has inspired kings, in my 
view, with the fear of their subjects, and that is 
a bad thing for a nation. N'ai-je pas raison, 
Monsieur Wieland ? But really I am monopolis- 
ing you — ^we have not come here to talk about 
Tacitus." And, casting a glance at the moving 
scene before him, he calls attention to the Emperor 
Alexander : 

"See how well he dances," Napoleon observes, 
and takes a pinch of snuff. 

'' I do not know why we are here, Sire," replies 
the simple Wieland, " but I do know that your 
Majesty makes me at this moment the happiest 
man alive." 

" Well, then, answer me," says Napoleon kindly. 

" Sire," returns the writer, " from the way in 
which your Majesty talks, I am led to forget that 
you are twice a sovereign, and only see in you the 
man of Letters. I know that you do not disdain 
the title, for I have not forgotten your pride in 
being a Member of the Institute I will, therefore, 
answer the man of Letters, and although I felt at 
Erfurt that I defended myself but feebly against 
your criticisms, I hope to make a better defence 
of Tacitus. 

" Of this historian," Wieland continued, " I 



— AND DEFENDED 123 

agree that his chief aim is to punish tyrants ; but 
if he denounces them, he does not denounce them 
to slavish men, who would revolt only to change 
tyrants. Tacitus denounces tyrants to the 
justice of history and to the human race, for it is 
said by philosophers that the human race must 
be tried by suffering until its reason acquires the 
force which its passions have up till then held." 

" Yet where is this force of reason ? " asks 
Napoleon. " I look for it on all sides and see it 
nowhere." 

" Sire," replies Wieland, " it is not so long since 
Tacitus has come into fashion, and that in itself 
indicates a marked advance of the human mind ; 
for during centuries, Academies would not read 
him, any more than Courts, and the slaves of 
taste were as much afraid of him as the advocates 
of despotism. It is only since Racine called him 
the great painter of antiquity that your universities 
and ours have felt disposed to inquire into the 
possibility of his being really so. Your Majesty 
declares that in reading Tacitus, you find de- 
nunciation, assassination, robbery on all hands. 
But, Sire, that is exactly what the Roman Empire 
was when governed by the monsters whom 
Tacitus so severely flayed. The genius of Livy 
followed the Legions of the Roman Republic 
throughout the world ; that of Tacitus con- 
centrated itself on the law reports (greffe), and 
it was here that the real history of the Empire 
was to be found. It is indeed, in these alone that 
we can read the history of nations of those 



124 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

unhappy ages, when princes and their subjects, 
opposed to one another in principles and ideals, 
lived in terror of each other. In such times there 
is little else to chronicle but the daily records of 
the criminal courts — ^when death at the hands 
of the public executioner comes to be regarded 
almost as the natural way of leaving life. 

" Sire, Suetonius and Dion Cassius have 
chronicled a far greater number of crimes than 
Tacitus ever chronicled, but they chronicle them 
in a style which is wholly devoid of energy, 
whereas nothing is more terrible than the stylus 
of Tacitus whose genius inclines before the spirit 
of justice alone. As soon, indeed, as he perceives 
the presence of Good — even in the reign of that 
monster Tiberius — he swiftly seizes upon it and 
gives to it the salience which he gives to every- 
thing he touches. He can even praise a fool like 
Claudius, where praise is really due, and this 
august attribute of justice, Tacitus extends with 
unerring impartiality to all conditions — to the 
Republic as to the Empire, to subjects as well 
as to their princes. By the quality of his genius, 
one would think him capable of attaching himself 
to the Republic, and his opinions about Brutus, 
Cassius, Codrus would seem to confirm this view. 
Yet, when he speaks of the Emperors who suc- 
ceeded in reconciling what was thought to be 
irreconcilable — namely. Empire and Liberty — we 
can feel that this system of governance appeals to 
him as the fairest discovery of history." 

Here a certain movement in the large group 



FOREWARNED ! 125 

of courtiers signifies, we may suppose, not so 
much admiration at Wieland's probably prepared 
eloquence as a desire to emphasise the obviously 
implied compliment to Napoleon — truly an un- 
deserved compliment, if ever was. 

" Sire," the Sage continues, "if it is true to 
say of Tacitus that tyrants are punished, once he 
has portrayed them, how much more truthful is 
it to say that righteous princes are rewarded once 
he has traced their picture for posterity ! " 

" I fight against odds. Monsieur Wieland," 
admits the Emperor darkly. " You sacrifice no 
advantages, I see, and you must have known that 
I was no admirer of Tacitus. Do you, by the 
way, correspond with Monsieur Johann de Miiller 
whom I met last year in Berlin ? " Napoleon 
was much too astute, we can fancy, not to 
have seen that all Wieland's eloquence had been 
prepared against contingencies. 

" Yes, Sire," replies the German very candidly. 

" Ah, then, confess," laughs Napoleon, " that 
he has written to you on the subject of Tacitus." 

''It is true," admits honest old Wieland, " it 
is indeed through him I learned that your Majesty 
liked to discuss Tacitus, and also that you did not 
admire him." 

" I will not admit yet that I am beaten," de- 
clares Napoleon ; "a thing I never admit very 
easily. I return to-morrow to Erfurt, and we shall 
resume our discussion about Tacitus. I have a 
sufficient stock of ammunition in my arsenal to 
show that for all his investigation of the motives 



126 NAPOLEON AND WEIMAR 

of great men, he did not sufficiently develop the 
causes and the intimate springs of important 
events. He did not study deeply enough the 
mystery of facts and ideas, and failed so to adjust 
them in the chain of events as to enable posterity 
to judge correctly and impartially. 

" History, as I understand it," Napoleon goes 
on, " must be able to seize upon individuals and 
nations and present them as they were in their 
own day. The historian should take into account 
the external circumstances which must necessarily 
have exercised a great influence on their actions, 
and see clearly the limits of their influence. The 
Roman Emperors were by no means so bad as 
Tacitus has described them. I much prefer 
Montesquieu to the Roman ; the Frenchman is 
more just and his judgments nearer to truth." 

It was then nearly midnight and Wieland began 
to feel the strain of expressing himself in a language 
which he was not accustomed to speak. " I 
took the liberty," he says, " of asking the Emperor 
if I might retire." 

" Allez,'' replied Napoleon graciously ; " bonne 
nuit ! " 

The Emperor, on another occasion, asked 
Wieland which age he considered to be the happiest 
for mankind — a question he had also put to the 
historian Miiller, at Berlin, in 1806, when the 
Prussian gave his verdict in favour of the ages of 
the Antonines. In his turn, old Wieland rephed, 
with admirable wisdom : 

" A decisive answer is not possible to such a 



WIELAND'S WISDOM 127 

question. The Greeks, judged by their general 
culture and by the political freedom which they 
enjoyed as citizens, had their ages of great 
prosperity. Rome counted among her princes 
more than one who might be called the good angel 
of humanity. Other nations, too, can boast of 
having had great and wise governors. Yet it 
seems to me that the general history of the world 
travels ever in one great circle, in which good and 
evil, virtue and vice succeed each other continu- 
ally. It is the duty of the philosopher to bring 
out all the good there is in each age, so as to make 
the bad supportable." 



CHAPTER VII 
THE IMPERIAL ART-PATRON 



A Specious Sentiinent — Art, Merit, and the Napoleonic 
Cult — The Corsicans Native Materialism — A Political 
Monument — Artists a ^^ Waspish Lot" — Art to Order 
— Feeding the Fraternity — Economy in Public Archi- 
tecture — A Napoleonic Art — The Emperor s Dislike 
of Architects — Some Prices paid to Famous Artists — 
The Co7'sican a Connoisseur ivithout Pretensions — 
Insistence on the Napoleonic Legend — How to hurt 
Englishmen — The Imperial Reclame — Napoleon s Art 
Collectio7i at La Malmaison — A List of Pictures 



NAPOLEON once declared to Decres 
that he did not want his reign to pass 
and leave a single man of merit un- 
recognised — a specious sentiment the 
sincerity of which becomes accurately measurable 
when we study the case of Madame de Stael, and 
consider his mode of distinguishing Monsieur de 
Chateaubriand. Merit which did not contribute 
to the Napoleonic legend was, in the eyes of the 
Corsican, no merit at all, and the estabUshed 
mediocrity of all those who formed part of the 
circle of his art patronage, whether as writers or 
poets or painters, may be put down, sans phrase, 
to the fact that artistic genius is a quality which, 
on the highest planes, can achieve its particular 
results only when it remains independent of, and 
even uninspired by, objective sources. Certainly 
the inspirations of a fighting soldier are not 
calculated to assist its progress in any surround- 
ings, or in any age — least of all such inspirations 
as came from Napoleon, whose artisticity was 
that of the geometrician or the mathematical 
expert, wholly uncoloured by sentiment, entirely 
lacking in the warmth of a higher or poetic vision, 
and Hmited altogether to the actuahties of current 
circumstance. Accordingly, when he decided that 
the Art of the first Imperial age of France should 
bear an Imperial cachet, he limited its expression 
not only as an artistic force, but also as one which, 
had it been left to work out its original genius, 
must have contributed by its own richer results 
to the greater glory of his reign. 

130 



POLITICAL ARTISTRY 131 

Despotism, it has been said, fears neither 
mathematicians nor artists, and while anxious 
for the advancement of all matters aesthetic, the 
Corsican gave his patronage to the Fine Arts for 
much the reason that inspires the great new-rich 
art -collectors of to-day — namely, self-glorification, 
not at all praiseworthy, and certainly not always 
artistic. We could cite, if necessary, many proofs 
here in point : he hastened on the building of 
the Louvre, for example, because, as Bausset 
(quoting the Emperor himself) says, it was neces- 
sary, in view of his relatively ambiguous position 
among the sovereigns of Europe, to possess a 
grander palace than other kings. When Vignon 
proposed his Temple of Glory, Napoleon agreed 
on the condition that the edifice should be 
completed within four years, because, as he 
said : 

" This monument is to some extent a political 
monument, and must therefore be finished quickly, 
so as to count for something in the national con- 
ditions of the day." 

No American raiser of sky-scrapers ever carried 
business-like expediency to a higher point than 
this, we think. And, as will be seen in due course, 
if he associated with artists and treated them with 
an amiability which one divines to be really 
foreign to his nature, it was certainly not for any 
regard for a class of beings who are to a great 
extent a race apart, and as such could win 
no sympathy from Napoleon's regimental mind 
with its plans arretes and its essentially fixed 



132 THE IMPERIAL ART-PATRON 

notions. In regard to the artistic brotherhood, 
indeed, we can well conceive of Napoleon de- 
scribing them in the phrase attributed to Lord 
Melbourne — " a waspish lot." All his affected 
intimacies with writers, painters, sculptors and 
musicians were calculated solely to make them 
contribute to the magnificence of his legend. 
Only this and nothing more. 

" The Emperor," says a writer of that time, 
" is most anxious to unite to the glory of a great 
sovereign, the reputation of an enlightened pro- 
tector of the Arts, which distinguished Pericles, 
Augustus and Louis XIV., and the mot d^ordre to 
the officials of the world of Art is to work towards 
this end." 

Talented artists were to be won over to official 
views about art matters by good salaries, as well 
as by the prospect of being permanently employed. 
At one time he considered triumphal arches as 
so many extravagances ; after 1806, however, 
when his mania for immortality became an en- 
during obsession, he decided to erect four such 
monuments, with the object, as he himself declared 
in his own cynical fashion, of feeding Sculpture for 
at least twenty years to come. And in a public 
manifesto, the essentially unartistic Modernist and 
Philistine speaks when he declares that in view 
of the valuable prizes which are being offered to 
art workers, France has a right to expect that 
her artists shall produce masterpieces ! Contem- 
poraries do not fail to note the real parsimony 
which marks his treatment of painters and 



ECONOMY IN ART 133 

sculptors, and a letter of his, addressed to the 
Minister of the Interior, recommends that function- 
ary to see to it that only the most economical 
styles are to be encouraged. To the same official 
he writes the following order in March, 1808 : — 

" I should like to have a bridge constructed 
leading to the Invalides. One like the Pont des 
Arts would come to about £30,000 and must soon 
repay its cost. Once completed, its shares could 
be sold and the money devoted to other civic 
improvements." 

Historical writers have not omitted to note 
that, wherever possible, he razed such monuments 
and edifices as were likely to recall the glories of 
previous French sovereigns, and to this tendency 
on his part may be attributed the destruction 
of Marly, of Chantilly, of the Abbey of Saint 
Martin of Tours, of Cluny, the disappearance of 
all of which historical grandeurs dates from the 
Consulate. Many of his intimates — ^if such a 
being ever possessed an intimate — declared that 
he not only was incapable of appreciating Archi- 
tecture, but that his antipathy extended even to 
the greatest exponents of that art, his expressed 
opinion being that they were on all counts inferior 
to engineers. To those who advocated the con- 
struction of spectacular edifices, and cited the vast 
constructions of Louis XIV., as contributions to 
the prestige of that monarch. Napoleon more than 
once replied, with much cogency, that the renown 
of a king lay not in monuments which the servility 
of one age readily raised to his glory, and which 



134 THE IMPERIAL ART-PATRON 

the insouciance of another demolished with equal 
readiness. One reason for his dislike of architects 
was said to be the extravagance they showed in 
estimates submitted for projected constructions ; 
in which estimate their sense of necessary expendi- 
ture came into violent conflict with that of the 
Imperial economist — a trait which suggests that 
the Corsican himself had few illusions that his 
reign was not to be a lengthy one ; a reflection, too, 
which becomes all the more insistent when we 
consider the fact that the Luxembourg's decora- 
tions were all executed in simili, as the artists 
put it, meaning that the walls and the pillars 
were painted to resemble marble, the candelabra 
to look like bronze, and so on. 

Heavily remunerated artists of the present day 
would certainly not think the following payments 
extravagant, considering the high status of the 
painters : For his picture of the Jaffa plague 
victims, Gros received 625 guineas ; Vernet, for his 
battle of Austerlitz, £800 ; David, for his Corona- 
tion and The Oath canvases, £4800. Imperial 
portraits had a regulation rate of remuneration — 
namely, £240 — ^while the " stock " portrait of the 
Emperor, to be placed in town halls and pre- 
fectures, cost just £120. Painters who executed 
miniatures of the sovereign received £20 to £24. 
Full-sized pictures of marshals and high officials 
went at £160. David's portrait of Pius VII. 
brought in £400 for the original and £480 for two 
copies by himself. For his battle of Quiberon, 
Hennequin received £160, in 1804, and artists 



THE PRACTICAL CORSICAN 135 

who executed pictures of the Imperial horses 
received £5, 5s. for each effort, while Vernet as a 
special favour got £10. Sculptors received £600 
for a large work, and full-length statues cost 
£400, the price of busts being £116. 

It is only fair to the memory of the Corsican 
to say that in matters of Art he never posed as 
a connoisseur, and if the charge of mediocrity 
hangs over the art productions of his age, it has 
to be remembered that in the majority of com- 
missions, the artists and the subjects were the 
choice of ministers who, like true business men, 
distributed their patronage usually in considera- 
tion of an honorarium. The great soldier, under 
no illusions as to his own aptitudes or tastes in 
aesthetic matters, never affected to be moved by 
any inspirations in regard to such matters. In 
architecture, in painting, in sculpture, the appeal 
made itself essentially to the natural objectivity 
of his mind. In a building, for example, he looked 
for solidity, rapidity of construction and economy. 
He was, indeed, so insistent on the first of these 
qualities, as likely to contribute towards the 
immortalisation of his own name, that had he 
possessed greater patience, said David, on one 
occasion, he must surely have built in granite. 
He was also a consistent advocate of iron for 
bridge -construction as well as for domes, even 
suggesting the employment of that metal for the 
pillars of the Pantheon. Swiftness in execution 
— ^this was a prime requisite of all his conceptions, 
and the fact carries its own explanation, showing, 



136 THE IMPERIAL ART-PATRON 

as it does, that his vanity, far more than any 
consideration of the aesthetic, counted in all his 
architectural projects. In June, 1810, he wrote 
to Montalivet urging him to greater activity in 
the building of the Arc de Triomphe : 

" I want to finish with this structure," he said, 
'' and if you cannot work more quickly, I will 
make a supplementary appropriation of £24,000 
to enable you to do so." 

Daru, supposedly the connoisseur of the 
Imperial entourage, once wrote to the directors 
of the Musee des Gobelins informing them that it 
was Napoleon's desire that artists should* confine 
themselves to historical scenes depicting the story 
of France, and it was in much the same strain that 
he urged David to give up painting the classical 
ages and confine himself to national — that is, 
Napoleonic — subjects. Again, in organising 
various competitions among artists, the Emperor 
insisted on historical subjects dealing with France 
as the first condition of successful candidacy. 
The sculptors were officially informed by a decree 
of 1806 that in the matter of bas-reliefs and 
statuary, the choice of subjects was to be made 
from : (1) the exploits of Napoleon ; (2) from the 
story of the Revolution ; (3) from the history of 
France. A premium was to be placed on any 
work which should humiliate England and Russia, 
and William the Conqueror was suggested as a 
model always likely to touch Englishmen in their 
tenderest susceptibilities. In 1805 he wrote to 
Talleyrand urging that Minister to begin a 



HIS PERSONAL TASTES 137 

campaign having for its object the staging of 
" comedies de cir Constance, ^^ as well as the com- 
position of ballads and music-hall songs bearing 
on his projected invasion of England. 

In the same year was issued another official 
note to the artistic brotherhood, in which it was 
stated that " all artists who by 15th August shall 
not have delivered their commissioned works, 
will be held to be unequal to the exigencies 
of government work." The Corsican evidently 
counted inspiration and temperament for minus 
factors in sesthetical productions. And with the 
commissions — what an artillery of instructions, 
delivered sergeant - major fashion ! Thus, to 
Gerard for his picture which presents Napoleon 
surrounded by his staff, signing the Swiss Act of 
Mediation : 

" Above all, put every possible magnificence into 
the uniforms of the officers attending on Napoleon, 
and a corresponding si7nplicity of detail for the 
Emperor, so that he shall stand out all the more 
clearly in the whole scene." 

Daru, on another occasion, ordered a series of 
miniatures of the Emperor, who was to be " re- 
presented with a rather pleasing (gracieuse) face." 
One of the best critiques passed upon Napoleon's 
sesthetic notions in painting was that which de- 
clared him to have appreciated David's reputa- 
tion rather than his talent. The Imperial taste 
was predisposed rather to the work of Gros, his 
favourite, and to Gerard and Vernet ; also to 
" anecdotal " painters like Prudh'on and Robert 



138 THE IMPERIAL ART-PATRON 

Lefevre. In regard to Gros, who painted the 
Jaffa picture, Napoleon was ever enthusiastic, 
and on inspecting that work of art declared 
that it was "a real masterpiece" and that its 
"miracle of chiaro-oscuro placed it on a level 
with the best work of Tintoretto and Paul 
Veronese." 

Napoleon had his own private collection at 
La Malmaison, and authorities declared that 
it provided an excellent index of his general 
artistic taste, as well as of that of Josephine. 
Gerard, Dow, Albrecht Durer, Champaigne, 
Murillo, Rubens, Teniers, Van Ostade, Era 
Bartolomeo were all represented in this gallery, 
and Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross was 
also included. He declared at St Helena that the 
Duke of Parma in 1797 had offered him £80,000 
to be allowed to retain Correggio's famous Saint 
Jerome from among the vast collection which 
Bonaparte was then despoiling. Many of his 
advisers suggested that the money was more 
necessary than the paintings. The young 
Corsican disagreed, however, and on the ground 
that the money would soon be spent, whilst 
Saint Jerome would remain an ornament of the 
French capital for ever, and could not fail to 
inspire other masterpieces. Erom the Grand 
Duke of Tuscany he stole the Medici Venus for 
admittedly the same reason. 

Following are among the principal paintings 
and other works of art which adorned Napoleon's 
private galleries at La Malmaison : 



HIS OWN GALLERY 139 

Francois Albane : Nature — a woman suckling 
her children, 

Fran(jois Albane : Diana bathing with her 
Nymphs, 

Barbieri : Saint Sebastian, 

Le Bachiche : The Fates, 

A. Carracci : Venus and Love, 

S. Ferrato : Copy of Raphael's Madonna 
della Sedia, 

J. B. Greuze : Young GirVs Head, 

MuRiLLO : The Virgin and St Ann, 

Rubens : Descent from the Cross, Taken from 
a Capuchin monastery at Lierre, near 
Antwerp. 

Rubens : Women Bathers surprised by Storm. 

Raphael : Holy Family. 

Raphael : St George ; St Michael. 

Del Sarto : Holy Family. 

Teniers : A Flemish Kitchen. 

Titian : The Toilet of Venus. 

Da Vinci : St Margaret. 

Da Vinci : Virgin suckling her Son. 

P. Veronese : Woman holding a Child. 

P. Veronese : A Venetian Family, 

C, J, Vernet : Italian Landscape at Sunset, 

Gerard : Portrait of Princess Caroline Bona- 
parte. 

Laurent : Full-length Portrait of Josephine, 

Unknown : A City in Flames, 

Unknown : Equestrian Portrait of Napoleon, 

Unknown : Portrait of Frederick the Great, 

Van Dyck : Children of Charles I. of England. 



140 THE IMPERIAL ART-PATRON 

Van Dyck : Portrait of Charles I. and his 

Consort. 
MuRiLLO : The Nativity. 
Holbein : Portrait of Laura. 
David : Children of Brutus. 
P. P. Prudh'on : The Four Seasons. 



CHAPTER VIII 
DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

David hi 179'7 — His Ideeting jvith Bonaparte — A 
Visit to the Atelier — A Soldier s Blunt Criticism — 
'^ These Military Philistines" — David's Promotion — 
Bonaparte crossing the Alps — David and his School 
— A Lover of the Limelight — David and the Corona- 
tion — A Painter s Whole Ambition — Gerard and the 
Coro7iation Picture— A Happy Suggestion — Pauline 
Bonaparte and Gerard — Napoleon s Satisfaction — 
David and the Legion — The Douglas Portrait of the 
Emperor — David and the Peerage 



LONG before Bonaparte had revealed, in 
the campaign of Italy, his genius for war, 
David was the most celebrated painter 
in France. He had played a considerable 
part in the tortuous political intrigues which 
closed the Revolutionary era, had been a partisan 
of the popular side, and even suffered imprison- 
ment for having criticised with too much candour 
the policies of self-interested leaders. 

Born in 1784, he had already won a European 
reputation with his Horatii, his Socrates, his 
famous Paris and Helen and several portraits. 
He was well known, therefore, to Bonaparte when 
the latter, after the battle of Rivoli, invited him 
to join his victorious army, thus presenting him 
with a rare opportunity of committing to canvas 
the scenes of several celebrated battles. David 
refused, pleading other engagements, but never- 
theless retained a kindly recollection of the 
young conqueror's interest. The artist was at 
that time engaged on the famous Sabine Women, 
and he was not to meet Bonaparte until the latter 
returned to Paris, when the secretary of the 
Directory, M. Lagarde, gave a banquet at which 
the Corsican was the guest of honour. He had 
stipulated for the presence of David, whose work 
had much impressed him, he said. Monsieur 
Lagarde agreed, and although he had no particular 
acquaintance with David, called immediately on 
the latter requesting the honour of his company. 
David declined, under some pretext or other, and 
it was only when Lagarde explained to him the 

142 



SOLDIER AND ARTIST 143 

quandary in which the refusal placed him, that 
the artist amiably consented to accept. 

General Bonaparte's sense of social decencies 
was evidently not a profound characteristic, for 
on the occasion of this banquet, having taken 
Madame Lagarde in to dinner, he requested another 
guest to occupy his place at the lady's right hand, 
and himself sat down by the side of David, who 
tells us that it was during this meeting he solicited 
the honour of painting the General's portrait. 
Some days afterwards Bonaparte proceeded to 
the artist's famous studio near the Luxembourg, 
accompanied by two aides-de-camp. In accord- 
ance with his pretence of sinking the military man 
and affecting the savant, on his return from Italy, 
the General, David informs us, was dressed in 
civilian garb — a dark blue frock-coat, a large 
black cravat, an enormous hat a comes and 
his hair heavily powdered. A sitting of three 
hours was given the painter, and, as might be 
expected, Bonaparte did not fail to show his 
impatience. He concluded the interview amiably, 
nevertheless, by inviting David to accompany 
him on his expedition to Egypt — an adventure 
which the artist refused on the ground of his 
fifty years. 

When they met again, after Bonaparte's return 
from the Nile, David had just put the last 
touches to his Ua'pe of the Sabine Women, Paris 
— ^indeed all artistic Europe — was then talking of 
this work, although the critics were by no means 
unanimous in its praise. There was a lack of 



144 DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

force in the whole composition, an absence of the 
suggestion of full movement, a failure to hint 
the required violence in such a tumultuous scene, 
the critics said. Bonaparte, preferring to judge 
for himself, decided to visit the atelier and was 
received by the master. 

" I never saw soldiers fight as you make your 
soldiers fight. Monsieur David," he said, after 
inspecting the canvas. " Let me show you how 
soldiers fight," and the General throws himself 
into the attitude of a soldier doing execution with 
his bayonet. 

David replies that it was not his intention to 
represent modern French soldiers, but warriors 
of antiquity. 

" But your warriors," Bonaparte goes on 
querulously, " lack fire, lack action and lack 
enthusiasm, my dear David. Take my advice 
and change all that. You will find that the public 
will be of my opinion." 

" These military Philistines know nothing about 
Art," cried David, when the First Consul had left. 
The artist did not easily forgive the Corsican for 
his somewhat brutal criticism — all the more so 
because his fellow-artists were of opinion that the 
painter's conception and execution were quite 
sound. Bonaparte made him some amends soon 
after by appointing our artist to be inspector of 
the schools of Fine Arts in France. It became 
customary thereafter for the Consul to take 
David on a tour of Paris, asking the painter for 
suggestions as to the embellishment of the city, 



IN THE ATELIER 145 

and in the course of these excursions, it is worth 
noting, David — an old Revolutionary — detailed 
to Bonaparte the grandiose schemes which the 
Revolutionary Fathers had entertained for making 
Paris the first capital of the world. David it was 
who suggested the modernisation of the Invalides 
— originally the work of Louis XIV. — as we 
know that famous edifice to-day. 

On his return from Marengo, the First Consul 
expressed a wish to be painted again, and David, 
sensible of the honour, suggested a picture of 
Bonaparte in battle, sword in hand. 

"No, my dear David," objected the General, 
" battles are not won with swords. I prefer to be 
portrayed in repose," and he goes on to give the 
painter some idea of what he thinks portraiture 
should be. David insists on longer sittings, only 
to evoke the First Consul's ire. 

" An exact portrait," he cries, " does not, I 
imagine, consist just in confining oneself to 
accuracy in details — a wart on the nose, for 
instance. What is necessary is not so much the 
physiognomy, as the soul of the subject." 

" But one condition does not exclude the other. 
General," objects David. 

'' Did Alexander ever sit to Apelles, think you ? " 
Bonaparte continues. " No one nowadays asks 
if the portraits of great men were like them. It 
is sufficient that their genius should be shown in 
the picture." 

'' Verily you teach me the art of painting," re- 
plies the artist. " But I feel that you are right and 



146 DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

will paint you without troubling you for sittings." 
The result was Bonaparte crossing the Alps, one of 
the best-known tableaux representing Napoleon. 

It is proper to chronicle here the fact that most 
of his biographers refuse — and in our view quite 
properly — to believe that David allowed a soldier 
to dictate to him as to the manner in which a 
painting should be executed. An artist so long 
celebrated was hardly likely to admit that even 
a First Consul could teach him anything about 
painting, says David's grandson and voluminous 
biographer, J. L. Jules David. In flattering the 
omnipotent Bonaparte, the artist may, however, 
have had in view his life's great ambition, which 
was to occupy in matters of Art the same position 
which the First Consul held as regards the national 
Executive. A short time before Marengo he 
had refused the official position offered to him 
by Bonaparte, because the decree described him 
merely as " the painter of the government." 
Bonapartism had already entered into fashion, 
and David, small blame, wanted to be supreme 
in his own domain. 

The painter's eldest son posed, in the sequel, 
for the figure of Bonaparte in the stately canvas. 
Gerard was also on one occasion called into his 
master's service to the same end, the youthful 
pupil posing for that heroic gesture which repre- 
sents the Conqueror with the right arm out- 
stretched and pointing upward. It is not long, 
however, before Gerard begins to tire, and his 
master chaffs him on his lack of stamina. 



GROS, GERARD, ISABEY 147 

" Tenez, Gerard," cries David, at last, " come 
off that ladder and take my palette. You can 
paint the arm much better than you pose for it." 

The work was completed on 21st September 
1801, and duly exposed for the public's inspection 
— at so many francs a head ! A long polemic 
followed in the papers, dealing with the painter's 
exploitation of the patriotism of his fellow- 
citizens, and it was loiig before David heard the 
end of his little harpagonade. 

The story of David's relations with Bonaparte 
includes that of the relations of his pupils Gerard, 
Gros, Isabey and other painters with the con- 
queror of Italy. Isabey 's two pictures General 
Bonaparte at La Malmaison and his Review by 
the First Consul at the Tuileries are probably the 
most popular works of that artist. Gros had 
already become celebrated by his noted tableau 
representing the plague at Jaffa, and had been 
instrumental, moreover, in bringing Bonaparte's 
attention to the merits of his master, when, armed 
with letters of introduction to Josephine, he joined 
the headquarters of the Army of Italy. Nor had 
he failed to make the most of his kindly reception 
at the hands of the Corsican. His pupils, hardly 
less than David, were well known, therefore, to 
Bonaparte on the eve of the establishment of the 
Empire, a short time before which event the 
Emperor-elect summoned his painter-in-chief to 
the Tuileries, asking him on what particular work 
he was then engaged. The story of Leonidas 
and his Spartans at Thermopylae — ^the subject 



148 DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

no of the painter's actual work — evidently made 
appeal to Napoleon. 

" You are wrong, David," he said, '' to waste 
your time painting beaten warriors." 

" But," objected the artist, " these vanquished 
heroes were as great as their conquerors." 

" Never mind," replied Napoleon testily ; " the 
name of Leonidas is the only one which has come 
down to us. The rest are all lost to history." 

As he left after his audience, Lucien Bonaparte, 
who had also been present, accosted the painter. 

" You must understand, my dear David,"' 
explained Lucien, " that my brother Napoleon 
takes an interest only in pictures in which he 
counts for something. It is his weakness and he 
has no objection at all to being in the limelight." 

Soon after David was given the Legion of 
Honour, and at the establishment of the Empire 
was appointed first painter to the Emperor, with 
the commission to execute in detail the ceremonies 
connected with the coronation of Napoleon. It 
is hardly necessary to go into the story of this 
spectacular episode in the history of the Corsican. 
Nevertheless, the mise en scene of the ceremony 
counted for so much in David's composition that 
we may recall the short description by Thiers : 

'' On the altar lay the crown, the sceptre, the 
sword, the mantle. The Pope, according to the 
ancient custom, touched the Emperor on the fore- 
head, the arms and palms with the sacred oil, 
blessed the sword which he also buckled on, the 
sceptre which he placed in the Imperial hands, 



THE CORONATION SCENE 149 

and then approached the altar to take the 
crown. 

" Napoleon, however, closely watching his move- 
ments, seized the crown from the Pontiff's out- 
stretched hands — not roughly, as it was said, 
but with decision — and placed it upon his own 
head. This action, the significance of which was 
clear to all present, produced an indescribable 
effect upon the assembly. Then the Emperor took 
up the second crown and, approaching Josephine 
as she knelt before him, placed it with evident 
tenderness upon the head of his Consort, who 
forthwith gave way to tears." 

David himself tells us of the many annoyances 
which the Imperial commission caused him, more 
particularly during the rehearsal for his final 
sittings, when pretentious courtiers, for whom 
the clock meant nothing, quarrelled with each 
other for precedence in the foreground of the great 
tableau. Finally, an official decree assigned to 
each personage a proper place. David, it may 
be said, had been given a suitable loge during the 
ceremony at Notre Dame, and there had made 
a rough draft of the scene at a highly dramatic 
moment — the Emperor in the act of crowning 
himself, as he had at first designed the work. 
Before starting on this tableau, the painter sent 
in a requisition for £1000, and Napoleon, to whom 
the request was submitted at Milan, scrawled 
across his paymaster's note the following words : — 

" If M. David has not yet received any money 
on account of the work of the Coronation on which 



150 DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

he is now engaged, I see no objection to his being 
paid 25,000 francs " — the required sum. 

In pursuance of his ambition to preside over 
the destinies of artistic France, David addressed 
a memorial in 1805 to the Emperor, soUciting 
for himself the position which Lebrun had 
occupied during the reign of Louis XIV. The 
Revolutionary of the days of Robespierre had long 
since learned the arts of the courtier, and the 
style adopted by the painter towards his Imperial 
patron was worthy of the most flattering effusions 
of the days of the Roi-Soleil. His candid biog- 
rapher and grandson, Jules, declares, sans fagons, 
that his grandsire's real object in soliciting a 
superior official post was to effect the removal of 
Denon from the headship of the Museum Art 
Gallery, a post which gave its holder an authorita- 
tive voice in all concerns connected with the Fine 
Arts, even to a control of the contracts for civic 
edifices. Napoleon, it would seem, never saw 
the memorial, since David received no acknow- 
ledgment as to his proposals. Denon executed 
the Colonne Vendome, it will be remembered, and 
never once lost the Emperor's favour. 

About this time Napoleon gave David a com- 
mission to execute a portrait of himself in regalia, 
for the city of Genoa. The work was submitted 
for Imperial inspection on 4th July 1806, when 
Napoleon refused to accept it, " as being so badly 
done that if the portrait were sent into Italy, it 
could not fail to give the Italians a poor idea 
of our art." In this explanation it is certainly 



PUPIL AND MASTER 151 

not hard to divine the Corsiean in search of an 
excuse. 

David's enemies soon heard of his bad fortune, 
however, and it was rumoured that the painter 
had confided the Genoa portrait to one of his least 
skilful pupils. Great hopes were accordingly- 
entertained by the opposition that the fall of the 
Maestro was imminent, all the more credibly so 
because Regnault — the painter of the Education of 
Achilles — had also been commissioned to execute 
a portrait of the Emperor. Regnault was, never- 
theless, not more successful than David, who, well 
knowing that his rival had engaged in many in- 
trigues for supplanting him, took his revenge in a 
bon mot which swiftly went the tour of artisticParis . 

"Well, Regnault," he said, on their meeting 
at the Institute " it appears the Emperor is not 
satisfied with our portraits. As likely as not, too, 
because I did not paint mine, as it is rumoured, 
and because you painted yours." 

The Coronation picture took some three years 
to execute, and the artist Rouget tells us that 
the greater part of the work was entrusted to his 
ablest pupils, David himself just giving the finish- 
ing touches . Gerard was one of the first to examine 
the completed canvas, and the master, knowing 
his old pupil to be a man of sound judgment, was 
anxious to hear his opinion. On arriving at the 
principal figure, that of the Emperor in the act 
of crowning himself, Gerard said : 

" If you will permit me, cher maUre, I must 
confess that the movement of the Emperor 



152 DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

crowning himself and holding his left hand on 
the hilt of his sword, in an attitude of defiance, 
is not very happy. It gives me the impression 
of being exaggerated and theatrical, and will not 
be especially pleasing to Napoleon. Perhaps the 
Emperor in the act of crowning the Empress would 
present something more lofty and impressive — 
more of that noble simplicity which we expect to 
find in your art, dear maitrey 

'' Diahle!^^ returns David, all alert. " Do you 
really think it would be an improvement, Gerard ? " 

" I certainly think so," replies the ex-pupil, with 
great frankness. 

" Of course," objects the master, " it will mean 
a big job to substitute the proposed figures. 
Nevertheless, you may be right, my friend, and 
we shall see what can be done." 

" Oh," exclaims Gerard grandly, " if it is only a 
matter of time, let myself and Barbier help you. 
Say but the " 

" Thanks, thanks," replies David, rather darkly; 
" but I could not dream of taking you from your 
own labours. Rouget and I can make any 
changes required." 

Gerard has hardly left the studio when David 
turns to Rouget : 

" What do you think of Gerard's idea ? " he 
asks. 

" Ma foi,'' says honest Rouget, " I think it 
worth considering." 

"Frankly," agrees David, "I think it good 
myself. The fellow may, indeed, be right. It 



PAULINE BONAPARTE 153 

will be more gallant — more like a Frenchman ; 
and, again, Napoleon will not appear to be so 
wholly engrossed in himself." 

So Rouget set about removing the self-crowning 
figure of Napoleon, and David replaced it with 
the one we all know — the Emperor in the act of 
crowning Josephine. Some days after the com- 
pletion of the new picture, Princess Pauline 
Bonaparte — the youngest sister — accompanied by 
Gerard, calls at the studio. The Princess is im- 
mediately attracted to the portrait of her august 
brother, and, with her usual thoughtlessness, turns 
to Gerard, who had evidently been talking, and 
says : 

" The Emperor looks well. It is, indeed, an 
excellent idea" — referring, of course, to the effected 
alteration. 

We are hardly surprised to hear, then, that 
David, when his visitors had left, turned to 
Rouget with the words : 

" You see, my friend, if I had allowed Gerard 
to touch my canvas, people would have said that 
he had done the whole thing himself." 

Nevertheless, it was said that David had to 
solicit permission from the Emperor to effect the 
suggested changes — ^in all probability the fact, 
since official sanction had already been given to 
the first conception submitted. The Emperor, 
with the Genoa portrait in mind, probably, paid 
his painter more than one surprise visit, during 
which he commented favourably or unfavourably, 
just as the fancy caught him. On one occasion 



154 DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

he remarked on the simple attitude of the Pope 
— originally depicted with his hands extended 
idly on his knees. 

" Pardi, David," exclaims the blunt soldier. 
" I did not bring the Pope all the way from Italy 
to do just nothing at all." 

The artist wisely changed the figure to the 
extent of showing the Pope in the act of giving 
his pontifical blessing. David relates himself how 
both Emperor and Empress, on another occasion, 
paid him a State visit, accompanied by chamber- 
lains, pages, equerries and maids-of-honour. 
Napoleon is evidently in the best of humours. 

" What ! " he cries, " but this is life, not art 
— action, action everywhere ! How well my 
mother looks, and how well the Pope ! You have 
done famously. Monsieur David, and I am quite 
satisfied." 

And with this the Emperor uncovers his head 
to the great artist. The Empress, attendrie to 
the verge of tears, then pays her compliment to 
David, and the courtiers, after their simian fashion, 
proceed to exhaust the lexicon of eulogy. 

David was appointed Officier de la Legion 
d'Honneur shortly after this, when the Emperor, 
anxious to have the artist's canvas Socrates^ 
asked where it was. On being told, he com- 
missioned David to repurchase it, giving him 
carte blanche in the matter of price. The owner, 
a M. de Courbeton, declared that he considered 
it priceless, but since the Emperor wanted the 
work, they might send to fetch it. David reported 







o -s 



A LAST MEETING 155 

to Napoleon, who, unexpectedly enough, showed 
the better side of his character. 

" It is evident that he wishes to keep your 
picture. Let him," he decided. 

In 1810 a reigning Marquis of Douglas ordered 
from David a full-length portrait of Napoleon. 
The artist accordingly represented the Emperor 
in the uniform of the Chasseurs de la Garde, in 
the act of leaving his study where he has passed 
the night at work, as is indicated by the candles, 
which have guttered out, as well as by a pendule, 
which points to four o'clock ; on a sofa to the right 
lies the Imperial sword. This tableau now belongs 
to Prince Roland Bonaparte. When the work was 
submitted to Napoleon before being dispatched 
to Scotland, he warmly expressed his pleasure. 

" You have, indeed, caught me this time, 
David," he said. " At night I work for the 
welfare of my subjects ; in the day-time for 
their glory." 

The last meeting of the painter with Napoleon 
took place during the Hundred Days, when, after 
a short visit to the famous atelier^ the Emperor 
conferred on David the insignia of a Commander 
of the Legion of Honour. It was also said that 
Napoleon had created his painter a Baron of 
the Empire, a tradition, says his grandson, which 
is not supported by any documentary evidence. 
David was among those w^ho voted for the death 
of Louis XVI., and it is certain that the letters- 
patent, if ever issued, were destroyed at the 
Restoration of the Bourbons. 



156 DAVID, THE IMPERIAL PAINTER 

As we have noted elsewhere, the story of the 
Imperial Painter includes that of Gros, of Gerard 
and of Isabey. The last-named of these was the 
only one who displayed any independence of 
character in his dealings with Napoleon, and 
once refused to supervise an historical painting 
which dealt with the Imperial legend until his 
collaborating fellow-artists were adequately re- 
munerated. Napoleon consented to the increase 
of stipend. 



CHAPTER IX 
CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

Canova a Great Philanthropic Spirit — Bonaparte and 
the Sculptor — Ca?iovas Independence — The Conditio7i 
of Rome — Modelling the First Consul — Napoleoji as a 
Sculptor s Subject — An Heroic Statue of the Corsican — 
Mars and Venus — The Ingenue Pauline — A Chats- 
worth Treasure — Canova and the French Capital — 
A Bust of Marie Louise — The Farnese Hercules — 
The Pope's Art Patronage — The Borghese Marbles 
— The Sculptor s Style — Napoleon and Rome — The 
Corsicaiis Cautiousiiess — Art a7id Religion — Pro- 
testants and Catholics — Arrogance of the Priests — 
Napoleon on Ccesar — ^^ The Great Man of the Great 
People" — The Corsican and the Pope — Canova' s 
Advice to the Eviperor — Oligarchic Venice — A Ca7idid 
Admission — The Day of Wagram — Canova and 
Marriage — Monsieur de Bouclons Canonisation 



WITH characteristic enthusiasm, patriotic 
Italian writers of the time of Napoleon's 
Italian campaign, 1796-1797, were wont 
to declare that their celebrated artist 
Canova was comparable with the young Corsican 
conqueror. Valeva per certo il Buonaparte, as they 
used to put it. Memoirs and journals of those 
moving days indicate very clearly the exalted 
regard in which the great sculptor was held by 
every class of his countrymen, and it would 
also seem established that by his noble personal 
character, by his activities in public well-doing 
and by the lofty appeal of his artistic productions, 
Canova has won, we think, a permanent claim 
to rank among the distinguished philanthropic 
spirits of all time. It was not long, accordingly, 
before Napoleon determined to attach this world- 
celebrity to his already princely suite, and as 
Alexander had willed to be painted by Apelles, 
so the conqueror of Italy decided that Canova 
should commit him in marble to posterity. 

The sculptor was then in his fortieth year, ex- 
hausted somewhat by labours which had included, 
among many more, his famous Daedalus and 
Icarus, executed in his twenty-first year, his 
Theseus, his Cupid and Psyche, his Venus and 
Adonis and his Hercules. Papal munificence and 
patronage had made him in his day the wealthiest 
artist in Italy, and already he entertained thoughts 
of retiring to his country estate ; all the more 
insistently, too, because those fervent hopes 
which Italian patriots had placed in the triumph- 

158 



A PROUD ARTIST 159 

ant progress of Bonaparte against the Austrians 
had proved tragically fruitless. Fallen Venice, 
erstwhile an appanage of the House of Habsburg, 
was now in the grasp of a new dictator, who, says 
de Bouclon, gave his arrogant commands in a 
language which Venetians had not even the 
advantage of understanding. 

It was not, however, until 1802 that the Italian 
was personally to meet Bonaparte, who had com- 
missioned his minister at Rome, Bourrienne, to 
inform Canova of the First Consul's desire that 
the sculptor should execute his bust. The terms 
mentioned were 120,000 francs (£4800) and all 
expenses. The artist objected in the first place 
to the tone of Bourrienne's instructions to him- 
self as savouring too obviously of a master's 
order to a servant, as he declared. In the second, 
he had never forgiven Bonaparte — an Italian, in 
reality — for having, by the Treaty of Campo- 
Formio, reduced Northern Italy to a condition 
which was hardly less than bondage. Above all, 
the depredations of Bonaparte and his Generals 
in the treasure-houses of Piedmont, Lombardy 
and Venice had caused him a sorrow the poignancy 
of which was many times emphasised in the case 
of an artist who was at the same time an ardent 
Italian patriot. 

"I do not refuse to acknowledge the well- 
deserved glory of the First Consul," Canova ex- 
plained to Cacault, the French Ambassador at 
Rome, who added his entreaties to those of the 
Minister; "he has rendered great services to our 



160 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

religion and to our civilisation, both of which 
he has rescued from savagery. In my opinion, 
he is greater than Alexander or Hannibal, or even 
Caesar. Nevertheless, I cannot help seeing in him 
an oppressor of Italy — a man equally guilty with 
those sovereigns who once partitioned Poland. 
I decline to execute the bust of such a prince." 

The Frenchman's reply, although a model of 
diplomatic persuasiveness, failed to move the 
sculptor. 

" Nature," said the adroit ambassador, " has 
at times produced great men of different kinds, 
and such great spirits, when contemporary, surely 
owe each other support, affection, loyalty. 
Alexander and Apelles could never have been 
enemies. To-day the great spirit of France calls 
to the great spirit of Italy." 

It was only when the Pope, Pius VII., and 
Cardinal Consalvi, an especial favourite of Bona- 
parte, urged the sculptor, on grounds of practical 
patriotism, to fulfil the First Consul's virtual 
command, that Canova consented to " obey, as a 
slave obeys his master." Freedom, Canova added, 
in a sonorous phrase, can alone mother the designs 
of great artists. In October, 1802, he left Rome 
for Paris — in a carriage which the First Consul had 
especially provided for the journey. 

" In his relations with the man who saw Europe 
trembling at his feet, Canova," says M. de Bouclon, 
" shewed a virility of character equal to his 
talents ; the artist indeed proved himself as great 
a man as the commander." An expression of 



A VISIT TO PARIS 161 

opinion with which few will be found to disagree, 
for on being presented to the First Consul, who re- 
ceived him with the most gracious condescension, 
the Italian, in reply to inquiries about Rome, 
replied : 

" I ask permission. General, to speak with the 
truthfulness and candour that are common with 
me. You ask news of Rome : Rome, I may say, 
has fallen to a depth proportionate to the height 
which you yourself have reached. The victories 
which have placed you in the same rank with 
Caesar have been as disastrous for the queen-city 
of the world, as they have proved glorious for 
your own name. Rome languishes in poverty, 
her palaces are despoiled, her time-honoured 
treasures are in the hands of strangers ; war- 
imposts have deprived her of her financial re- 
sources, while the closing of her ports, by your 
own orders, do not allow her to repair her losses." 

" I intend," replied Bonaparte, with unruffled 
equanimity, " to restore Rome. As the well- 
wisher of mankind, I intend also to be its bene- 
factor. In the meantime, however, what do you 
require for the work you have undertaken ? " 

" Nothing," said Canova. " I am ready to 
execute your orders." 

" Good : then you shall do my statue," replied 
Bonaparte, and dismissed the Italian. 

During the next weeks the soldier sat for one 
hour daily to the artist, Josephine being present 
at times. True to his sense of time-economy, 
Bonaparte received officials and signed documents 



162 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

during each seance, and even fingered through 
Hterary works which had just been pubhshed, 
while Canova modelled the features of his illustri- 
ous sitter. Politics naturally counted for some- 
thing in the conversations which took place 
between the artist and his model, and on one 
occasion Bonaparte declared it to have been his 
intention to remove to Paris the famous bronzes 
of Saint Mark at Venice. Whereupon Canova 
bluntly replied : 

" The fall of that Republic will darken the rest 
of my life " — an indication of his patriotic senti- 
ments which did not displease Bonaparte. 

His usual frankness to Napoleon considered, we 
may properly conclude that it was by no means 
in the way of flattery that the Italian on one 
occasion addressed the First Consul in the 
following complimentary terms, as he studied the 
bust he had just modelled : — 

" Your countenance/' he told Bonaparte, very 
correctly, "is so favourable to the work of the 
sculptor that if we were to discover it among 
ancient remains, it would appear evident at once 
that it was the bust of one of the great men of 
Antiquity. If I have modelled well, the work 
will be a success. It is, however, not the sort of 
face which pleases the fair sex. Bonaparte has 
too much of Hannibal in him to possess very 
much of Alcibiades." 

Having accomplished the preliminaries necessary 
to his great work, Canova decided to return to 
Italy and complete the statue in Carrara. M. de 




Photograpli : Broo 



THE CHATSWORTH NAPOLEON 
By Caitova 



A COLOSSAL STATUE 163 

Bouclon gives an instance of the finesse — some 
would call it by an uglier term — of the First 
Consul in connection with the departure from Paris 
of the great artist. On his arrival in order to 
take leave of Bonaparte, the latter received him 
at the same time as an envoy from Tunis, to 
whom, through the medium of an interpreter, he 
addressed a solemn harangue, urging the duty 
incumbent on the authorities of that barbaric 
State to safeguard the interests of its Christian 
subjects. 

" Go back to the Pope," said the First Consul, 
turning to Canova, " and tell him that you 
have heard me preaching the perfect liberty of 
Christians." 

Bonaparte understood clearly, comments 
Bouclon, that in order to leave a favourable 
impression of his character and personality on 
the mind of the sculptor, it was necessary to show 
that he was a good Catholic. Without religion, 
he could be no hero for Canova. Nor, we may 
conclude, was it altogether of his own direct 
initiative that the French Ambassador at Rome 
gave a magnificent reception in honour of the 
home-coming artist. The statue of Bonaparte 
was to be executed after the style of the Farnese 
Hercules, and to be ten feet in height. 

It is interesting to recall here a hon 7not of 
Canova in regard to his gigantic figure of Napoleon. 
The sculptor had requisitioned from Carrara an 
enormous block of marble, and therefrom had 
carved his heroic effigy of the Conqueror, with 



164 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

the right arm outstretched. Monsieur Artaud, 
then secretary of the French Embassy, drew 
Canova's attention to the amount of valuable 
material which must go to waste in the loss of 
the marble which lay below the extended arm. 

"No," the sculptor answered; "under the arm 
of Mars I found my Venus." 

For this Venus — which is now in Florence 
and a replica of which, also by Canova, is at Lans- 
downe House — it will be remembered, Pauline 
Bonaparte posed, and the reflection that brother 
and sister were sculpt — if such a word there be 
— from the same block of stone, is not without 
a certain subtle pathos of its own, since each 
enmarbled figure must remain, throughout the 
ages, equally an emblem of the general mother- 
hood of Earth and of the fleeting tragedy of 
kingly grandeur. Pauline Bonaparte was not, 
it would seem, more scrupulous in the domain of 
moral proprieties than her august brother was 
careful of the political proprieties. Did not the 
fair Princess once, in this regard, give her friends 
the measure of her sense of what was quite proper ? 
She posed, it will be recollected, for Canova's 
Venus, in the all-but-altogether, a fact which soon 
became known to fair prudes of the social world. 
One such candid friend affected to be very much 
shocked that Pauline should so far have forgotten 
the common decencies of modest womanhood : 

" And did you not feel somewhat — er — 'm — 
inconvenienced ? " she asked rather haltingly. 

" Oh, of course, there was a fire in the room," the 



PARIS IN 1810 165 

Princess explained simply and without the least 
notion that she had done violence to propriety. 

In 1805 Canova paid a second visit to Paris, 
when he presented the bust of 1802 to the 
Emperor, the larger statue being delivered only 
in 1808, at which time Napoleon may be supposed 
to have, to a great extent, outgrown his first 
perfervid cult of Antiquity and to have turned 
towards a distinctive Napoleonic style in all art 
and artistic matters. The fact remains that the 
heroic statue did not meet with its great prototype's 
approval. And Louis XVIII., in 1815, evinced 
no particular disposition to retain this somewhat 
startling memento of the triumphant supplanter 
of the Bourbons. The French Government 
accordingly presented it to Wellington, who, it 
was well known, developed after Waterloo a 
distinct monomania in the matter of Napoleonic 
effigies and relics. It is now at Chatsworth. 

Canova's last meetings with Napoleon took 
place in 1810, when he was summoned — not 
invited — to Paris. On 12th October of that year, 
Marshal Duroc conducted him into the presence 
of the Emperor who, as in the case of Goethe's 
presentation at Erfurt, was at breakfast. The 
Empress Marie Louise was also present. 

" You have grown thin. Monsieur Canova," 
said the Emperor, with what may be imagined to 
be a kind of affected solicitude for the sculptor's 
health. Napoleon had sought through his Italian 
agents to induce the Italian to take up his residence 
in Paris, and the object of the artist's present 



166 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

visit was the execution of a statue of the Empress, 
Canova had declared that, while anxious to please 
the Emperor in all possible respects, a permanent 
change in the scene and method of his life was 
absolutely contrary to the interests of his art. 
These objections the sculptor renewed in person 
to Napoleon on the. occasion of his third and last 
visit to the Emperor. 

In vain did the great soldier seek to dazzle the 
unaffected Italian with prospects of a splendid 
social and official role in the capital of the world, 
as he put it : Canova was to be appointed to the 
academic and exclusive Senate ; to be given the 
high supervision of all the schools of Art ; he was 
to reside at the Louvre, where visiting kings were 
customarily lodged. Canova remained unmoved, 
however, and declared with his usual candour, 
that, apart from the commission of committing 
to marble the lineaments of Marie Louise, his 
principal object was to plead the cause of rapidly 
impoverishing Italy to its King. 

" Sire," declared the artist, " you may dispose 
as you will of my life, for my services are always 
yours to command. I beseech you, nevertheless, 
to allow me to return to Rome, once the work for 
which I have come shall be completed." 

The artist was dealing, however, with a supreme 
type of the man tenacious of his intention, and 
Napoleon, who allowed himself in no circum- 
stances to be easily vanquished, did not hesitate 
to descend to something like threats to achieve 
his purpose : 



THE EIGHTS OF ROME 167 

" Here," he said, " you will be in your proper 
place, since Paris now houses all the great 
treasures of the classical ages. We only lack the 
Farnese Hercules, and even that we shall soon 
have." 

" Your Majesty," cried the honest ItaKan, with 
all the warmth of a sincere indignation, " at least 
leave something to our old Italy ! Those ancient 
monuments form an historic chain in the country's 
life which should not be broken by removals of 
our treasure from either Rome or Naples." 

" But," Napoleon objected, " Italy can seek 
compensation by excavation work. I shall order 
some to be undertaken in Rome. Has the Pope 
spent much on enterprise of this kind, tell me ? " 

The Pope, as the Emperor well knew, was in 
those days a poor man and could ill spare the 
funds needful for underground exploration in 
search of art treasures. Canova recalled the fact 
to his Imperial patron, going on to indicate his 
general views as to treasure-trove — somewhat 
naif, perhaps, considering the character of the 
Corsican. 

" The Roman people," he said, " possesses an 
inviolable right to all monuments found upon its 
own territory, since these are in a certain sense 
an inherent product of the soil, and neither the 
Romans nor the Pope may dispose of what are 
really national and natural heirlooms." 

Napoleon here interrupted the artist to inform 
him that he had paid fourteen million francs 
(£560,000) for the Borghese Marbles which, it 



168 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

may be mentioned in passing, Prince Camillo 
had been forced to surrender, without the option 
of ransoming them. As against this vast sum 
Napoleon referred somewhat contemptuously to 
the few hundred thousand lire which the Pope 
expended annually on art purchases, whereupon 
Canova correctly reminded the Emperor that the 
Pope's poverty had been largely forced upon him 
by the French armies of invasion. 

The conversation then turned upon the ten-foot 
statue which Canova had delivered in 1808, the 
Emperor declaring that he would have preferred 
it draped. 

" God Himself," Canova replied candidly, 
" could not have executed a beautiful work of 
art if he had tried to represent your Majesty as 
you are dressed now — in top-boots and uniform. 
In Sculpture, as in all the other Arts, we have our 
sublime style, and the sublime style of the sculptor 
is the undraped figure, or else a style of drapery 
which is proper to our art — such as the toga. 
With regard to the equestrian statue which I am 
now executing of your Majesty, I could not repre- 
sent your figure undraped, since my intention is 
to represent you in the act of commanding an 
army. This was customary with the ancient 
sculptors, as it is also customary with modern 
artists." 

At this point Napoleon interrupted the Italian 
to ask him if the statue of 1808 was being cast in 
bronze, and on being answered in the affirmative, 
replied that it was his intention to visit Rome — 



" MEGALOPREPCEIA " 169 

an intention which was never carried into effect ; 
for notwithstanding his worship of Antiquity and 
all that Rome represented for the ancient and 
modern worlds, it was somewhat extraordinary 
in Napoleon's fate that he should never have seen 
the Eternal City. Canova encouraged his Imperial 
patron in this idea of looking " with his own eyes " 
upon the home of the Caesars, and readily con- 
jured up visions of Trajan's Forum, the Capitol, 
the triumphal arches, the Via Sacra, the Appian 
Way and the many columns of victory. 

" It was not only our political greatness, but 
also our love of the grandiose which produced 
so many works of magnificence," the sculptor 
declared ; and the words take the general reader 
down to Zola's wondrous psychological study, in 
Rome, of the virtues and vices political and social 
which attend on the cult of the grandiose, and how 
this spirit has haunted the Eternal City under all 
its mighty masters. 

Canova started to work on his task of modelling 
a bust of the Empress Marie Louise on 15th October 
1810, and in accordance with his settled plan of 
never allowing his second Consort to remain alone 
with a strange man, Napoleon himself attended 
each seance given by the Empress to the Italian. 
It is solely in pursuance of our endeavour to 
present Napoleon in as many temperamental 
aspects as possible that we emphasise the curious 
trait in the Corsican's character which forbade 
him entertaining the notion that woman was at 
all trustworthy in her relations with the opposite 



iro CANQVA AND NAPOLEON 

sex. Monsieur Frederic Masson, the voluminous 
historian of the Napoleoniad, declares, however, 
that it was not so much jealousy that suggested 
to him the necessity of " placing the youthful 
Empress in the impossibility of compromising 
herself." He did not understand woman, sajys 
Masson, although he was willing to legislate for 
her. He acted out of sheer dynastic prudence, 
for, as he told his Cabinet on one occasion, adultery 
is merely a matter of a sofa. And he remained to 
the end ever of the opinion that even an ordinary 
tSte-d-tete between a man and a woman more often 
than not tended to take a " natural " turn. 

Somewhere we remember to have read, in 
authentic memoirs, that the Empress Marie 
Louise once commanded a Court tradesman to 
submit certain designs in tapestry which had 
appealed to her taste. Accordingly the upholsterer 
presented himself in person at her Majesty's 
apartments, where we may suppose him to have 
spent some time paying out rolls of carpetry for 
inspection by his Imperial patroness. On leaving 
the rooms of the Empress, the upholsterer was 
pounced upon by the waiting Emperor, who, 
having ascertained the nature of the man's 
business, dismissed him with a brutal gesture and 
proceeded to his Consort's apartments, where, 
with eyes ablaze, we can imagine him to have 
demanded of her the meaning of her conduct. 
The poor young Empress declared with tears that ' 
the visitor was only an upholsterer ! 

" Never mind, it is enough that he was a male. 



THE ROMAN CAUSE 171 

and had no business here," roughly repUed 
Napoleon, whose jealous mind probably foresaw 
the possibility of his successor on the throne being 
a cross between an upholsterer and a Habsburg. 

At the seance of 15th October the Emperor 
was anxious to hear from Canova something about 
the climate of Rome. 

"Is it as unhealthy now as it was in the time 
of the Ancients ? " he inquired. 

" It would seem so," replied the sculptor, who 
also remembered to have read in Tacitus that on 
the occasion of the return of the army of Vitellius 
from Germany, the soldiers fell ill after bivouack- 
ing on the Vatican Hill. Napoleon immediately 
rang for his librarian, who brought the Annals, 

'' The sickness of the soldiers proves little," 
the Emperor explained simply, sure of his expertise 
in such a matter ; " troops that are rapidly 
transported from one climate to another soon 
fall ill, but just as quickly recover." 

And Canova here takes advantage of the 
Emperor's curiosity about Rome to continue his 
advocacy of the Roman cause, urging the great 
one to put into immediate practice those designs 
for the restoration of the city which he was 
known to entertain. Napoleon assures him that 
it is his intention to make Rome the capital of 
Italy, incorporating Naples in his schemxe of 
unification, an idea which gives the sculptor the 
opportunity of representing his views as to what 
is really necessary for the well-being of his com- 
patriots. It is highly interesting to note that 



172 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

Canova attributed much to the influence of 
Rehgion in Art : 

" ReUgion, which is favourable to the Arts," 
he declared, " grows weaker and weaker in my 
country. Among the Egyptians, among the 
Greeks and the Romans, it was Religion alone 
that encouraged Art. The immense sums which 
were expended on the erection of the Pantheon, 
on the statue of Jupiter at Olympia, on that of 
Minerva at Athens — all this was due to Religion. 
With the Romans it was the same : their works 
bear the seals and emblems of Religion, and 
even Alaric, the Visigoth, respected the edifices 
of Religion as the real centres of culture and 
enlightenment." 

After which and much more to the same purpose, 
Canova goes on, like the honest partisan he is, to 
declare that above all the Roman Catholic Church 
has been the true mother of Art : 

" Sire," he said, " the Protestants are satisfied 
with a plain church and a Crucifix, and so have 
no need of beautiful objects of art, while the 
churches which they possess have been erected 
and adorned by Catholic artists." 

" He is quite right," agreed the Emperor, turn- 
ing to his Consort, " the Protestants have nothing 
beautiful." 

All of which, on the part of both Canova and 
Napoleon, was somewhat in the nature of argu- 
mentation along very narrow and materialist 
grounds, it must be allowed. The soldier was 
on safer territory when he replied to Canova 's 



PRIESTS AND POLITICS 173 

appeal for reconciliation with the Pope by 
assuring the artist of his willingness to do so, 
but for the arrogance of the clergy. 

" The Priests," said the Emperor, with much 
cogency, " want to govern everywhere, want to 
interfere in all things, political as well as spiritual, 
and, like Gregory VII., are content with nothing 
less than absolute mastery. The Popes have 
always sought to keep the Italians in subjection, 
and that, too, even when they were not the 
absolute masters of Rome. What were the 
factions of the Orsini and the Colonna tribes, 
if not organised and subsidised intrigues to this 
especial end ? " 

And to an admission by Canova that the Popes 
had on several occasions — as in the reign of 
Alexander VI., of Julius II. and of Leo X. — 
begun the military conquest of Italy, Napoleon, 
in a very human touch, puts his hand to the hilt 
of his sword, answering with the easy nonchalance 
of the master who is certain of his subject : 

" Only the sword can achieve conquest — c'est 
Vepee quHl faut.'" 

" And not altogether the sword. Sire," retorts 
honest Canova ; " the shepherd's crook — the 
crozier — is also an essential. Machiavelli himself 
could not decide which had contributed most to 
the greatness of Rome — the arms of Romulus or 
the religion of Numa. It is true, indeed, that 
these two forces must march together, and if 
the Popes have not distinguished themselves as 
warriors, they have in other ways written their 



174 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

exploits upon the pages of history, and often 
with such splendour as to win universal 
admiration." 

" Caesar," cries Napoleon, interrupting him, 
'' was the great man of the great people ; and 
not only Caesar, but other Emperors such as 
Titus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius. The Romans 
were always great till the time of Constantine. 
The Popes made it their policy to maintain discord 
throughout Italy, and were always the first to 
call in the French and the Germans to fight 
their battles against the people." 

This expression of opinion opens the way for 
the patriotic sculptor to make another appeal 
for his beloved Rome. Napoleon retorts by 
declaring that the Vatican had made it a settled 
policy to resist him wherever it could and how 
it could, and this notwithstanding the fact that 
the Emperor allowed the French Bishops to 
govern according to their own notions in all that 
concerned purely religious matters. 

" Is there no religion here in France ? " ex- 
claims the Emperor. " Who restored the altars ? 
Who protects the clergy ? I require my share of 
obedience ; but I find the Pope is altogether pro- 
German and pays most attention to what Vienna 
says." In saying which he looked pointedly at 
Marie Louise. 

" Oh," retorted the young Empress bravely, 
" I can assure you that when I hved in Germany, 
they used to say that the Pope was altogether 
pro-French." Napoleon passes over this un- 



OLIGARCHIC VENICE 175 

expected sally and goes on to explain that he 
quarrelled with the Pope for refusing to expel 
the Russians and the British from his States. 

" He even excommunicated me," fumes the 
Emperor, " and does not seem to realise that in 
the end, France may break off from Rome, even 
as the English and Russians broke away in their 
day." 

Canova replies that such a schism would be 
a calamity for himself and his Empire — all the 
more so, says the plain-spoken sculptor, as he is 
about to become a father — an honour which could 
not at that date, 15th October, have been very 
distant, since the Emperor was married on 
2nd April 1810 and the King of Rome was born 
on 20th March 1811. What Marie Louise thought 
of this bluff suggestion, which concerned herself 
so intimately, we do not learn. There is some- 
thing that is far from displeasing, however, in 
this domestic and rather bourgeois scene, set as 
it were in a very desolation of greatness and 
splendour, and Napoleon, with unusual good 
humour and tact, closes the seance by reminding 
Canova that he, not less anxiously than the 
sculptor, desires to be on good terms with the 
Vicar of Christ. 

In the succeeding seance the conversation turned 
on the glories of oligarchic Venice, when the 
Italian — who was of Venetian origin — expressed 
the view that the Republic would never have 
fallen had the State placed greater trust in the 
patriotism of its generals. The Venetian 



176 CANOVA AND NAPOLEON 

oligarchs feared, said the sculptor, that a Caesar 
might make his appearance and inevitably to 
their undoing. Whereupon the Emperor replies 
with the candid enough admission : 

" You are right. I once told the Directory 
myself that if they continued to make war, a 
soldier would certainly arise in France who must 
end by dictating to themselves." 

In advising Napoleon to safeguard the interests 
of the people of Florence in respect of their art 
treasures, the sculptor added that encouragement 
of Italian painters must redound all the more to 
the Imperial credit, since the House of Bonaparte 
had originally sprung from Italy. 

" What ! " cries the Empress, turning to her 
Consort, " are you not a Corsican ? " and is 
surprised to hear that the Emperor is really of 
Italian origin, as Canova says, and as Napoleon 
admits with a suggestion of some pride. The 
Emperor does not, however, hold Italian painters 
in very high respect, and awards the superiority 
to French artists, who, he says, are not such 
good colourists, but are better in the matter of 
line-work. 

Downright Canova sees nothing out of place 
in recommending both the Emperor and the 
Empress to look after their health. Napoleon, 
he thinks, overdoes it somewhat : 

" Que voulez-vous, done ? " replies the Emperor 
good-humouredly. " I have sixty millions of 
subjects, from eight to nine hundred thousand 
soldiers, one hundred thousand cavalry. The 



A QUEEN OF CONCORD 177 

Romans themselves never had so large a number. 
I have fought forty pitched battles, and at 
Wagram our artillery fired a hundred thousand 
shot. At that time," he adds gaily, looking at 
his youthful Consort, " this young lady was an 
Archduchess of Austria, and on the day of Wagram 
assuredly wished me dead." 

" You are right," admits the Empress, with 
a bright laugh ; "I certainly did." 

The great sculptor had represented Marie 
Louise as Concord — her marriage with the Emperor 
in 1810 had brought about a short season of peace 
— and the result was pleasing to the illustrious 
couple. Canova in his Memoirs tells us that at 
their last meeting Napoleon asked if he was 
married. 

"No, Sire," replied the sculptor simply, "I 
have been on the point of marrying several times, 
but many incidents preserved me my freedom. 
Besides, the fear of not being able to find a woman 
who should love me as I must certainly have 
loved her — this consideration enabled me to 
devote myself to Art alone." 

Bouclon pays the tribute of a tear to this 
last interview between the Sculptor and the 
Conqueror. They only met again in heaven, he 
says. 

Which is certainly a first-class compliment to 
Napoleon ! 



CHAPTER X 
THE IMPERIAL MUSICIAN 



Napoleon on Music — Italian Musicians versus German 
— National Value of Opera — Napoleon no Musician 
— His Plans for the Musical Art — The Eroica Sym- 
phony of Beethoven — Salaries of Official Singers — A 
Surprise for Vatican Celibates — La Belle Grassini — 
The Southern Temperament — Grassini' s Disobedience 
— Proud MoJisieur Paer — Grassini, Wellington and 
Napoleon — An Intellectual Singer 



NAPOLEON, according to the Corre- 
spondance, once wrote as follows to the 
directors of the Conservatoire at Paris 
in regard to Music : — 
" Of all the Fine Arts, Music is that which has 
most effect upon the passions. Consequently it 
is the one which the statesman should most 
encourage. A musical composition which calls 
forth the loftiest inspirations has far more prac- 
tical influence than a reasoned discourse or a 
didactical essay, and touches the heart more 
deeply. ... A cantata well executed awakens 
sympathy, and good-will arises from sympathy." 
It was the opinion of the Emperor that the 
Italian School of Music was pre-eminently that 
which by appealing to the sympathies moved 
men to good dispositions and to resignation. 
The compositions of Germany, he said, except 
several of Mozart and a few others, appealed to 
the quality of action in man and had in them 
some suggestion of a rebellious note. Never- 
theless, when Mehul composed his oratorio, 
Joseph, Napoleon assured him that the best way 
to merit his favour was to produce pieces which 
inspired heroic sentiments in the nation and the 
army. It is a tribute to the Corsican's fair- 
mindedness that when a composer of note pro- 
duced an opera which displeased him, owing to a 
" political " tendency which he affected to find 
in it, the Emperor allowed it to be played " until 
the public could no longer digest it," as he held; 
the piece was soon forgotten, and neither the 

i8p 



AN UNMUSICAL EAR 181 

author nor the public was deprived of due 
rights. 

" The Opera," he once told his Council, " costs 
£32,000 yearly. Yet it is necessary to support 
an institution which flatters the national vanity, 
and we must subsidise it at the expense of other 
theatres. . . . Let us, therefore, have no vaude- 
ville at the Opera, but only what is consistent 
with the dignity of a great national institution. 
. . . We might be induced to subsidise the Opera 
Comique to the extent of £4000 a year ; but only 
on the express condition that first-class singers 
and actors shall consent to appear." 

Like most men whose masculinity is the pre- 
dominating trait of the whole character and 
temperament, Napoleon was not a lover of music 
and had no very willing ear for song. His 
secretaries. Fain, Chaptal, Bourrienne, Meneval, 
as well as his man Constant, all tell us that during 
his rare fits of idleness he was wont on occasion 
to burst into songful numbers of the homely or 
provincial kind, and on the eve of a campaign a 
frequent musical ditty on his lips was that which 
sings of Marlbrough on his way to the wars. 

" It was a strong voice," says the body -servant 
simply, " but not pleasant to the ear, and it was 
his habit to sing thus when moving rapidly from 
one room to another in his petits appartements,^^ 

Napoleon's national programme was, however, 
too comprehensively laid out to allow of him 
overlooking the very just claims of the musical 
world — in our own opinion an art far above that 



182 THE IMPERIAL MUSICIAN 

of the Drama — and provision was duly made, as 
we have seen, for opera and its exponents. 
Once, while attending a pupil's concert at the 
Conservatoire, he rewarded the singer of a simple 
air by Paisiello with a substantial money prize, 
Paisiello — ^the author of the famous Chinese 
Idol and the original Barber of Seville, on which 
theme Rossini improved — having been his 
favourite composer. This artist he summoned 
from Naples in 1802 and assigned to him the 
task of organising an Imperial orchestra for the 
Tuileries, at an honorarium of £850 yearly and 
a Court carriage. After he had made the acquaint- 
ance of Beethoven's music and heard what the 
connoisseurs had to say about that master's 
wondrous art, he set about making him the 
fashion, as he himself said, although his own 
tastes leaned towards the florid schools of Italy. 
Beethoven, who was a convinced Republican in 
politics, admired Napoleon as the ideal soldier 
until he assumed the purple and, indeed, called 
his famous Eroica symphony by the title 
Napoleon Bonaparte. After 1804, however, he 
declined politically to countenance the Corsican, 
and at the latter 's death in 1821, on being asked 
to compose something in memory of the great 
departed, declared that he had already written 
his funeral march, referring to the marche fundbre 
in the said composition. 

His singers were well paid as a rule, Crescentini 
and Brizzi receiving each £1200 yearly, besides 
perquisites ; while Mesdames Grassini and Paer 



MONSIEUR MEHUL 183 

were paid £1500 and £1200 respectively. The 
Imperial ballet had no complaint to make of its 
treatment, and here we recall that when Pope 
Pius VII. went to Paris in 1804 to crown the 
Emperor, an especial surprise was prepared for 
the Vicar of Christ and his Cardinals, when, 
during a grand musical representation, a large 
ballet of beautiful coryb antic nymphs burst upon 
the stage and executed a sensational amount of 
" leg-business " directly over the heads of the 
astonished Vatican celibates. 

To the composer Mehul, who was not a 
favourite of his, Bonaparte once declared that 
the music of the Germans and the French was 
" scientific," but without the sparkle and tuneful- 
ness of the Italian schools. Mehul, who evidently 
had a mind of his own, tried to defend the French 
exponents on the ground that their dramatic ex- 
pression and psychology were superior. Napoleon 
objected to contradiction and replied querulously : 

" That is just you, Mehul. You may have 
a great reputation, but your music bores me 
nevertheless." 

" And what does that prove ? " retorted the 
angry composer, immediately turning on his heel. 

Napoleon was, however, not always so brutal 
with his musicians. Once Paisiello spatchcocked 
a beautiful air entitled Sei Morali, by Cimarosa, 
into his own opera, / Zingari, and during the 
rendering Napoleon could hardly contain his 
enthusiasm. Its rendition over, he turned to 
Paisiello, congratulating him : 



184 THE IMPERIAL MUSICIAN 

" Ma foi,^^ cried the Emperor, " the man who 
wrote that air can call himself the first composer 
in Europe." 

"It is by Cimarosa," explained the discon- 
certed Maestro. 

" I am sorry," returned Napoleon sympathetic- 
ally, " but I cannot withdraw what I have said." 

On the morrow his musician-in-chief received a 
handsome present. 

To Lesueur, the composer of Les Bardes, 
Napoleon, on hearing the opera for the first 
time, gave the Legion of Honour and, a few 
days afterwards, a gold snuff-box stuffed with 
banknotes worth several hundred pounds. 

Zingarelli, the composer of Romeo e Giulietta, 
once had a brush with the Corsican : at the birth 
of the King of Rome, the musician, then choir- 
master at St Peter's, was given orders to have a 
Te Deum sung, but the Maestro refused on the 
ground that he knew no King of Rome but 
Pius VII. He was summoned at once to Paris, 
where he was commanded to compose a mass, 
paid in all some £600 for his work and sent home 
again. Another singer, Marchesi by name, during 
the campaign of Italy, was asked once by the 
youthful General to sing an air for his table 
company. The tenor replied by telling Bonaparte 
that if he wanted a good air he had only to take 
a turn in the garden and get some. They threw 
Marchesi out for his bad manners on that occasion ; 
but on another he consented to sing, and Bona- 
parte and he made it up. Crescentini, the famous 



SIGNORA GRASSINI 185 

castrato, was paid, as we have said, about £1200 
yearly as first singer, besides large presents. 
Napoleon would not allow him to sing in public, 
and gave him the Order of the Iron Crown — an 
honour to which the existing Knights and Com- 
panions took exception, on the ground that 
Crescentini, a castrato, was not physically compos. 
La belle Grassini, however, took up the cudgels 
on the singer's behalf : 

" What has his wound to do with the Iron 
Crown ? " she asked plaintively. And Paris 
laughed. 

This Signora Grassini, one of the most beautiful 
women of the age, and inconte stably the first 
contralto of her time, entered for a generous 
consideration into the life of Napoleon. He first 
met her in Italy during the Italian Campaign 
when, according to his own account, the delicacy 
of his position — a youth commanding veteran 
generals — required from him the exercise of all 
his tact and circumspection. He was, however, 
very much amourdche of the fair songstress, 
and, according to Bourrienne, lived with her 
quite openly in Milan — a charge which Napoleon 
refuted at St Helena when he recalled that their 
intimacy only began in 1805. La Grassini, he 
told, marvelled that he could look upon her, in 
that year, when in 1797 he had refused the 
favours which she had been only too willing to 
grant him. It is certain, however, that she was 
officially attached to the Consular establishment 
in 1801, and Napoleon, Fouche tells, paid her 



186 THE IMPERIAL MUSICIAN 

from his private purse £600 a month, insisting, 
however, that she should keep out of Josephine's 
way. Inevitably, Bonaparte could devote but 
a short time to love affairs, and Madame 
Grassini was clearly one of those southern natures 
which require unusually frequent blooding. We 
are hardly surprised to hear, then, that the lovely 
cantatrice soon proved faithless. There was a 
certain Rode, a violinist and composer in her 
orchestra, who attracted her attention and suc- 
ceeded so far in capturing her heart that she 
consented to elope with him. Napoleon over- 
looked this escapade when, as Emperor, he placed 
her at the top of the list of official singers. She 
was charged by Napoleon in 1810 with refusing 
to attend the rehearsals for an opera, and Napoleon 
had her summoned to his presence. He was at 
breakfast when she arrived and the following 
dialogue took place : 

" Grassini," frowned Napoleon, " you are 
preventing us from seeing the opera, by not 
attending rehearsals. You keep our musician 
waiting." 

" Excuse me. Sire," replies Grassini, " but 
your musician keeps me waiting. It is etiquette 
in Italy for the first rehearsals of an opera to 
take place at the piano of the Pr-rima Donna 
Assolutissima, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Zingarelli — 
all these, who are quite as good as Monsieur Paer, 
I imagine, waited on m^." 

" So-ho 1 " cries Napoleon, swallowing an oyster. 
" What have you to say, Monsieur Paer ? " 



NAPOLEON DECIDES 187 

The latter had laid the charge of insubordination. 

" I cannot, Sire," explains the grandiloquent 
Maestro, "consent to wait on any prima donna, 
however eminent, however absolute. I may once 
have done so, and indeed, often carried my humble 
operas round to the residences of famous cantatrices 
— like any common bagman. But," and Paer 
draws himself up to the last line of his five foot 
two inches, and throws out a thirty-three chest, 
" that was, your Majesty, before I had the honour 
of being appointed director of music to the 
Emperor of the French. I thought. Sire, that 
it was due to my dignity to remain in my rank 
— more befitting the glory of Era " 

" Ta, ta, ta," Napoleon interrupts testily 
" Monsieur Paer, you shall visit Madame Grassini 
once. Madame Grassini, you shall call on 
Monsieur Paer twice. Bonjour,^'' 

Grassini in 1815 became the mistress of the 
victorious Duke of Wellington. From what the 
chroniclers tell us, she was not much impressed 
by this Anglo-Irish soldier, and much preferred 
her part-countryman, Bonaparte, for all his 
brusqueness and unsentimentality. Here, how- 
ever, we may presume that the Duke's hope- 
less and unrequited infatuation for Madame 
Recamier entered into the pique of the singer — 
an infatuation, by the way, which had once 
obsessed Napoleon and which remained, as in 
Wellington's case, also unrequited. Grassini was 
a woman of considerable intellect, a quality which 
rarely distinguishes singers, whether male or 



188 THE IMPERIAL MUSICIAN 

female, and her hons mots had considerable vogue 
in Paris and Milan. It is to this lady is attributed 
the retort made to Bonaparte, who was accusing 
the Italians of being natural thieves : 

" Non tutti, ma huona 'parte,'' replied the singer, 
who remembered the depredations of the young 
Conqueror in the art-galleries of Italy. 



CHAPTER XI 
EELIGION OF NAPOLEON 

Modern Views of Religiosity — Newman and Manning 
— Men and the Atheistic P^iew — Napoleon after the 
Egyptian Campaign — Real Value of Religion — The 
Corsicans Essential UnbelieJ — "An Instinct of Spirit- 
ualism" — A Sound German View — The Chevalier 
de Beaut erne — A Napoleo7iic Press- A gent — The 
Napoleonic Expression —Mans Simian Disposition 
— "Christ is no Man" — Beauteimes Puerilities — 
Cardinal Fesch on his Nephew — Religion postulates 
a Calvary — Monsieur de Norvins — Napoleon s Mind 
too positive for Belief — His Taste for Religious 
Discussion — The Murder of Enghien — Napoleon s 
Cynical Explanation — His Choice of National Religions 
— His Political Horror of Atheists 



ANY work which attempted to show the 
temperamental side of Napoleon would 
be incomplete if it did not include some 
account of his attitude towards spiritual 
matters. All the more so, perhaps, at the present 
time, when the psychologists of history, in their 
studies of great men are becoming accustomed to 
attribute given religious tendencies in their heroes 
to specific qualities of temperament and soul, rather 
than to a belief in God. Cardinal Newman, we 
are nowadays assured, was attracted towards the 
Church of Rome more by the artistic cravings of 
his nature, than by the fact that his studies in 
ecclesiastical doctrine had moved him to the 
conviction that the Anglican Church possessed no 
claim to represent the Christianity of the Apostolic 
age, as Catholics would assert. Manning, a 
strong presumption has it, saw the certainty of 
a grand political role in the Roman Church with 
the possibility of promotion to the Papacy — he 
obtained, indeed, one vote towards that honour 
in 1878 — if only backed by the support of Great 
Britain, at a time when our country was strengthen- 
ing her interests in Southern Europe. And if 
personal ambitions and considerations can be 
assumed to be the motives which turned men like 
Manning and Newman into virtual apostasy, 
we may not implausibly suppose that minor 
spirits are moved to commit their heresies 
because, let us say, the vestments of the Roman 
Church suit their particular style of beauty, or 
because the so-called Oxford manner is likely to 

190 



SAVAGE MAN— A DOG 191 

impress the female portion of Roman Catholic 
congregations — as we sometimes think. 

The definite adoption of the atheistic view by 
any individual — for it is to the credit of thoughtful 
men that they fight hard against this final sur- 
render of their first ideal — is easily fixed in the 
history of great characters, and it is clear enough 
that when Bonaparte returned from Egypt, he 
had finally given up all hope of a God. 

" I have seen man in the savage state," he de- 
clared, " only to realise that he is no better than 
a dog." And though in the Concordat he adopted 
an official religion, it was not — who needs to be 
told ? — for any higher motive than that which 
inspires the apostles of neo-Christianity themselves 
— namely, that religion is a handy instrument of 
political influence, the main tendency of which 
is to keep the people in subjection. Partisans 
have, of course, adopted the view that Napoleon 
re-established the Catholic religion in France 
because of his inherent belief in that system — 
entirely forgetful of the fact that so positive a 
mind as that of the Corsican could entertain no 
illusions at all that men who are educated to 
accept the teachings of an arbitrary authority 
must fall far below the standard of intellectuality 
— and, therefore, manhood — of those whose spirit 
of independence is nurtured in all such ideas 
as are associated with the right to exercise 
private judgment. Even Monsieur Masson, whose 
capacity for original research no one is likely to 
deny, affects to think that Napoleon sincerely 



102 RELIGION OF NAPOLEON 

believed in the religion which he replaced on the 
altars of France — a view which is wholly incon- 
sistent with a proper understanding of the 
Corsican. 

Even if it be conceded that at least the great 
soldier was a Deist, we are unlikely to find 
much satisfaction in this fact, considering the 
definitions which the Deists give of their God — 
an impersonal influence, a conscious force, notions 
not so low as Pantheism and yet not so high 
as Theism. Chateaubriand tells us that even in 
his attacks upon the Church, Napoleon showed 
that he possessed "an instinct of spiritualism" 
and that his " irritations against the Church are 
not of a philosophic nature, but bear the impress 
of a religious character." Such opinions we may 
take to mean that Napoleon did not overlook the 
educative and ethical value of a religion which 
Macaulay could speak of as the greatest monu- 
ment of human policy that the world has known. 
And if in his last will and testament the Corsican 
declared himself to die in the Catholic faith, we 
may be certain that dynastic reasons counted for 
much in that somewhat belated auto-da-fe. 

A German writer, Doctor Max Messer, declares 
that Napoleon was the first great apostle of a 
typically modern philosophy — namely, that of 
religious individualism, in which the idea of God 
assumes the proportions not so much of an idea 
as of a sentiment. Like a true temperamentalist, 
says the German, in effect. Napoleon had his 
own God, just as Schiller had his ; the poet 



M. DE BEAUTERNE 193 

maintaining that Christ was an historical necessity 
and that civiHsation would not have been possible 
had not some philanthropic instinct in the great 
spirits of later antiquity enabled them to see the 
possibilities for human culture inherent in the life 
of Christ and his teachings. 

" A State religion became, therefore," says 
Messer, " equally an historical necessity for 
Napoleon ; and as Schiller regretted the dis- 
appearance of the ancient gods, so Napoleon felt 
himself forced to express, as in 1798 on the Nile, 
his admiration for certain qualities of the Moslem 
religion, and in 1811 for those of the Protestant." 

In the year 1840, when Louis Napoleon was 
seeking to advance his pretensions to the throne 
of his illustrious uncle, there appeared a work 
which purported to show that the founder of 
the dynasty had based his ultimate political 
conceptions — the unification of all the States of 
Europe under one head — to a large extent on the 
idea that without the aid of Papalistic Christianity 
no system of universal government, such as 
Napoleon aspired to, would have been possible. 
The author of this brochure was a certain Chevalier 
de Beauterne, and if he had been an ascetic 
Christian Brother, he could hardly have shown 
a more child-like loyalty to his own Church, or a 
greater naivete in setting forth the belief in its 
doctrines, which he ascribed to a man whose mind 
was of so positive a kind and method that we 
may be certain it accepted nothing in the way 
of hypothesis that did not immediately concern 



194 RELIGION OF NAPOLEON 

itself with the practical business of his own vast 
career. 

The object which the publication of this book 
had in view did not, we feel sure, deceive people 
in those days, and it was soon recognised to 
be a frank appeal, with ulterior motives, to the 
essential religiosity which supposedly underlies 
the Latin character. Belonging though it did 
to the class of political tricks which the French 
very aptly describe as procedes connus, or known 
processes, it nevertheless had a great vogue in its 
time, and we think small blame to those who made 
use of so plausible if impossible an hypothesis 
as the rehgious sentiments of Napoleon in order 
to further their own aims — all the more so that 
we fail ourselves to see how a working or enduring 
morality can be developed in young minds by 
any code which rejects the idea of a Supreme 
Being. The purely ethical religions have certainly 
not succeeded in achieving a high standard of 
virtue or civilisation, so far as we have studied. 

All this does not, however, establish the case 
for the rehgiosity of the Corsican, and it is our 
conviction that his whole life provided a negation 
of his having regarded religion as anything but 
what it is — namely, an instrument of virtual ob- 
scurantism when its application is made to over- 
docile minds. Excessive emphasis has been laid, 
we think, by commentators on the fact that, as 
it is said, his recorded views on religion, given by 
Gourgaud, Montholon, Bertrand and others, all 
bear the impress of Napoleon's own particular 



IMITATIVE MAN 195 

style of phrasing. The arts of simianism and 
psittacism are not, however, confined to the spoken 
language, and modern periodical literature shows us 
often enough that the gift of happy expression can 
be independent of even rudimentary scholarship. 
A visit to one of our law-courts, or to our churches 
or to the House of Commons itself, will indicate 
very quickly how much of the essential parrot 
there is left in the race, just as a superficial 
observation of the social cHmbing classes shows 
how near to the monkey is imitative man. 

In the expressions of opinion, when in exile, 
which we have of Napoleon, there is a pronounced 
similarity of style which disconcerts as often as 
it convinces, and if the Corsican was the complex 
and many-sided character that we are taught to 
believe him, then those who chronicled his sayings 
must have been strangely fortunate in finding him 
so often in the same mood. If, in any case, the 
staccato and laconic style was Napoleon's style, 
we may be very certain that among so imitative 
a race as the French, it soon became a fashion, 
and accordingly we find but little grounds for 
attributing any particular phrase to Napoleon 
simply because it appears to be expressed in a 
style which was said to have been peculiar to him. 
Monsieur de Beauterne may be right in his opinion 
that the fond des pensees and the nerf du raisonne- 
ment are typically Napoleonic ; nevertheless into 
more than one opinion to which the Chevalier 
attaches much account, we cannot but see that 
Beauterne has read a meaning which Napoleon 



196 RELIGION OF NAPOLEON 

could not at all have entertained. He is alleged, 
for example, to have said once : 

" I know men, and I declare to you that Jesus 
Christ is no man "—a statement which, if it was 
ever made by the master positivist, must be taken 
to mean that Christ was so pronounced a type 
of the mystic as to have ceased to retain the 
ordinary qualities and characteristics of a man. 
Napoleon, who, Madame de Stael assures us, 
was accustomed to look upon ordinary beings as 
" simple facts," would assuredly not have ad- 
mitted that he was himself a man in the ordinary 
sense, and we know that even as late as 3rd 
December 1804, he could tell Decres that he 
envied Alexander the Great the popular ignorance 
of an age in which the Macedonian could success- 
fully claim to be the son of Jupiter. Nor, in this 
connection, must we overlook a common retort of 
his to Josephine when the latter accused him of 
infidelity : "I am not a man as other men, and 
ordinary laws do not apply to such a being as 
myself." 

At all events we declare our total inability to 
accept a phrase which he is said to have addressed 
to Bertrand when the latter assured him that he 
could not see the divinity of Christ : 

" Well," Napoleon is alleged to have said, 
" if you cannot see that Christ is the Son of God, 
then I was wrong to make you a general." 

At Rivoli we cannot imagine Bonaparte pausing 
to think if Massena possessed, or not, a religion ; 
or Soult, at Austerlitz; or Ney, at the head of his 



CARDINAL FESCH 197 

five thousand cavaliers on the slope of La Belle 
Alliance. Beaut erne is full of puerilities of this 
kind, and in a later brochure based upon his book, 
and bearing the imprimatur oi the See of Tournai, 
we are supplied with just such illustrations as are 
supposed to move the first communicant's mind 
to fervour. Thus : Bonaparte embracing the 
Vicar of Christ in a kind of filial rapture ; or 
Napoleon standing on the altar of the Tuileries 
chapel, his sword buckled, his legs wide apart, 
arms folded, and not looking particularly impres- 
sive as he says to some cleric-looking person in 
a soutane : " Desormais nous aurons la messe 
ici tous les jours." 

Beauterne — who was this gentleman by the 
way ? We can find no trace of him in the bio- 
graphies. May he not have been a kind of literary 
John Doe ? — Beauterne, we repeat, was, or pre- 
tended to be, so lacking in an appreciation of the 
Napoleonic reclame as to present as conclusive 
the opinions of that old sinner Cardinal Fesch 
concerning the Christian sentiments of his illustri- 
ous nephew. Cardinal Fesch, we may believe, 
was hardly less a part of Napoleon's system than 
were his marshals, or his minister of police, or 
than Schulmeister. Indeed had Pius VII. been 
translated between 1809 and 1814, we reasonably 
presume that Fesch would have been imposed on 
the College of Cardinals as the successor of Pius. 
V^Tiile talking about Napoleon's Christianity, the 
Cardinal, says Beauterne, could not control his 
feelings, and two great tears rolled down his 



198 RELIGION OF NAPOLEON 

cheeks ; after which Fesch goes on to tell how 
the young Napoleon was of so religious a turn of 
mind that, like Rawdon Crawley of the Heavies, 
he once had thoughts of taking up the Church as 
a profession! And, adds the prelatical ex-army 
contractor, Napoleon chose the day of the Assump- 
tion for his jour de fete—SiS if the great Corsican 
had made special arrangements for being born 
on the fifteenth day of August. And then the 
Cardinal deplores that he has lost a letter of 
two pages in which the youthful Bonaparte 
tells him of his unalterable devotion to the faith 
of his fathers, and how the young Corsican once 
expressed his ambition to go to Pondichery to 
convert the natives ! Quoting the naif Beauterne 
we get : 

" Before the battle of Marengo," said Fesch, 
"I met my nephew, by arrangement, who told 
me that if he won, he should return to France 
and re-estabUsh ReUgion in the country. He then 
asked me what Cardinals he was likely to meet in 
Italy, and on my mentioning one or two, he told 
me to go on at once and tell them that he intended 
to re-estabUsh Cathohcism in France— but only 
within certain limits. As for the philosophers— his 
sword, he said, would deal with those gentry. He 
could have had permanent peace with the English 
had he consented to establish Protestantism in 
France as the national religion, but Napoleon 
would Usten to none of England's overtures and 
replied that he intended to re-estabUsh the 
Catholic Church in France solely because it was 



TALLEYRAND'S RETORT 199 

the true religion. It was suggested to him that he 
should create a religion of his own, and Napoleon 
repHed that in order to establish a new rehgion, 
it was absolutely necessary for the founder to 
ascend Mount Calvary." 

This last statement is too obviously suggested 
by Talleyrand's answer, in 1801, to a Theo- 
philanthropist cleric who complained that his 
new rehgion did not seem to make much headway. 
" Monsieur," repHed the ex-Bishop, " Chris- 
tianity was successful in finding One who was 
willing to die for His faith. Perhaps if you were 
to die for yours, Sir, success might attend on 
your movement." 

The Theophilanthropist's fervour did not, how- 
ever, carry him to extremes of this painful nature. 
Partisans have exhausted themselves, again, in 
seeking to point to Napoleon's pious dispositions 
in the face of death, forgetful that Napoleon's 
ambition was restricted at St Helena to the 
continuance of his name and the survival of his 
dynasty. To have died the atheist— the potential 
sun-worshipper he had so often declared himself 
to be to his intimates — would have been the 
destruction of all hope of his family reconquering 
his throne in Cathohc France, and no one knew 
this better than himself. Nor does Monsieur 
de Norvins — also a pro-Bonapartist writer — 
impress us very much when he tells us, in that 
grandiloquent style which marked the Romantic 
age in France, that Napoleon was too penetrated 
with the sentiment of his own greatness not to 



200 RELIGION OF NAPOLEON 

believe in the immortality of the Soul. It must 
have been writers of this type who invented such 
scenes as that in which Napoleon is represented 
as addressing himself to a group of philosophic 
doubters among his generals, on the way to 
Egypt, pointing a fat hand upward, contemplating 
the starry firmament and saying in his high- 
pitched voice : 

" Who made all that, gentlemen — who ? " 
M. Thiers, too, when he treats us to a long 
discourse on the certainty that Napoleon's dis- 
position turned him to religious ideas, appears 
to overlook the fact that religion of this kind, 
being natural religion, is no religion at all in the 
opinion of orthodox Christian teachers, who insist 
on practical virtues and take but little account 
of virtues which are simply the expression of 
a personal or natural disposition. Thiers even 
cites as a token of Bonaparte's religiosity the fact 
that he discussed willingly all subjects connected 
with philosophy and creeds — a token, we think 
ourselves, which, being positive evidence of a 
man's striving after a finality that is impossible, 
also settles the case for his essential unbelief. 
He is a sorry being, in any case, who is not moved 
by the story of philosophic or theological thought, 
and it would be surprising, moreover, if so political 
a mind as that of Bonaparte had not early seized 
upon the ethnical element in the importance of 
religion. 

With all the best intentions towards religious 
belief, we cannot admit that its advocates prove 



AN ESSENTIAL ATHEIST 201 

Napoleon to have looked upon it as anything 
higher than a forceful aid to government, or, as 
he termed it himself, a good instrument of order 
and tranquillity in the community. And with 
regard to the alleged discourses on the subject 
with which he is said to have killed time at St 
Helena and elsewhere, we are finally and firmly 
convinced that they are nearly all suspect and that 
the sentiments attributed to him there were subse- 
quently invented by men whose interest it was to 
serve the cause of Louis Napoleon. 

The man who sanctioned the murder of Enghien 
was one who had long ceased to entertain the notion 
that there existed a Supreme Judge of human 
acts ; while the words with which he excused that 
atrocious act showed that whether he had ever 
believed in one or not, he already placed himself on 
the level of divinity. The Almighty Himself could 
not have explained the killing of Enghien with a 
fuller sense of being the supreme dispenser of life 
and death : 

" I have shed blood," said Napoleon ; '' but 
entirely without anger, and simply because I hold 
that bloodshed enters of necessity into political 
combinations." 

Milton's Satan never placed his self-sufficiency 
on a higher altar than this. No; the picture of 
Napoleon in Paradise can never satisfy us, nor 
any suggestion that he believed in one, even 
though Monsieur de Beauterne assures us that 
his hero's spirit is already there. 

" When I took over the direction of affairs in 



202 RELIGION OF NAPOLEON 

France," said Napoleon once at St Helena, " I 
had already formed my opinion as regards the 
importance of religion in a State, and had firmly 
decided to re-establish it. Nevertheless, I found 
myself forced to do battle with many prejudices 
before I could take the final decision to make 
Catholicism the State religion, and there were 
many in my Council who urged me to make France 
Protestant. 

** * Faisons-nous protestants,' they said, ' and 
we shall thus get rid of the difficulty of the 
Concordat.' 

'' Yet by making Protestantism the national 
faith, I should only have split France into two 
camps and created endless trouble for myself 
and the country. Catholicism, on the contrary, 
assured me the support of the Pope, and in view of 
our fortunate military situation in Italy, I had no 
doubt that I could easily bend the Vatican to my 
will — ^that is to say, I should entirely control 
the vast influence exercised by the Chief of the 
Christian world ! Although modern philosophers 
have sought to show that Catholicism is anti- 
democratic, and so have encouraged anti- 
clericalism, and even religious persecution, I am 
convinced that there is no religion which adapts 
itself so well as Catholicism to the different forms 
of government, or which is so favourable to a 
democratic or a republican State. 

" It is not the religious fanatics whom we have 
to fear, but the atheists perverted by false 
teachings. There is as much difference between 



EQUALITY FOR ALL 203 

the religion of Jesus Christ and the infamous re- 
Hgion of Gregory VII. as there is between Heaven 
and Hell. The teaching of Bossuet is the one we 
must follow, and with such a spiritual director 
we are not liable to go wrong. The moral of the 
Gospel is equality, and so is most favourable to 
Republican government." 



CHAPTER XII 
THE IMPERIAL EDUCATIONIST 

Action, the Royal Quality in Man — The Necessity oj 
Religious Training — Dislike of Precocity in Children 
— Geography and History essential in Early Years 
— Linguistic Talent no Test of Mentality— Are the 
Classics valuable? — "Bending the Mind to Labour"' 
— Value of Geoynetrical Studies — The Age of Puberty 
and its Mystic Revohitions — The Imperial Catechism 
— Monsieur de Porialis, imperiomaniac — Napoleon 
and God — Some Questions and Answers — Contempt 
for Ordinary Intelligeiice — Cardinal Capraras Role — 
Napoleon and his Opportimity — The Super-Caligida 



ACTION — action ! He who acts is master. 
Activity is the royal quality in man. 
Train the child to it and let its first 
sports be a prelude to its exercises. 
Graduate both so as to give the child agility and 
strength." 

Here we may presume the real Napoleon to 
have spoken, when he drew up his system of 
education for the little King of Rome, then in his 
third year. His insistence on the cultivation of 
energy and activity runs through the whole 
curriculum which he thought to be most suitable 
for the proper rearing of every youth, and in so 
far provides us with a considerable insight into the 
soul and character of this arch-toiler among men. 
Like the practical being the Corsican was, he in- 
sisted, too, on the necessity of religious education 
as a good preparation for ethical instruction, 
though in this respect we may presume that he 
regarded such training from the point of view of 
the political ruler who wants to find his subjects 
docile and amenable to laws of order. 

" Man requires a future," he said in a phrase 
addressed obviously to the clerics, " and whatever 
some may say, it is necessary to him. So then, 
every religion professing to teach the existence of 
God ought to be protected, and all the more so 
since the God of a nation arrived at maturity is 
no longer the God of its youth. When men were 
savage their God was a savage and wrathful God ; 
when they grew humane their God became gentle. 
Time reveals the true God— the God who forgives." 

206 



THE GIFT OF TONGUES 207 

The Emperor was no lover of precocity in 
children, a fact which we can easily co-ordinate 
with his dislike of the super-woman, or precieuse. 
Precocious wit and imagination in forward 
children — a quality which often pleases very 
foolish mothers, by the way — are not to be 
tolerated, in Napoleon's opinion, for " the mind 
that outruns the body has no solid basis : the 
child grows dull or remains feeble." In all educa- 
tion of children the first process must be to 
exercise the memory and the body ; and as an 
aid to the cultivation of memory he suggested 
Geography and History, in which studies both the 
eye and the ear receive their meed of exercise. 
Of foreign languages — in which he was not himself 
especially apt — he very properly thought little as 
contributing to the formation of a strong or pro- 
found intellect ; a view which modern education- 
ists are showing some disposition to adopt, since 
the acquisition of a language must be based for 
the greater part on a gift of what the French well 
term psittacisme (Greek psittakos, a parrot), or 
parrotry, and we cannot disagree with Napoleon, 
who maintained that the gift of many tongues 
rarely distinguishes a man of profound learning 
or even real ability. 

"It is the business of nurses to begin them," 
said Napoleon, " and of valets de chambre to 
go on with them. It may even be questioned 
whether the language of Virgil and Horace should 
enter into the plan of an education " — a view 
which we are sorry to hear expressed, although 



208 THE IMPERIAL EDUCATIONIST 

we find ourselves leaning towards his blunt 
opinion that " the facility for acquiring languages, 
which so many fools admire, is at bottom little 
better than a brevet of incapacity and ignorance." 

The great object of the teacher in the early 
stages of instruction — about the age of ten — 
should be, in Napoleon's opinion, to " bend the 
mind towards labour, and if the master succeeds 
in giving his pupil an appetite for work the future 
is safe." As might be expected, he placed much 
faith in the intellectual training to be gained by 
the study of Geometry, which (he held) exercises 
at once the judgment, the memory and the 
imagination by its processes and figures. Its 
graduated progress from what is simple to what 
is complicated, makes it mental food for every 
age and puts it within the reach of every intellect, 
he said. Children of all capacities, from ten to 
thirteen, may begin its elements, and by means 
of these we may sound their capacities. Like 
the penetrating observer of human nature that he 
was, the great soldier added the following profound 
truth which our pedagogues, present as well as 
past, seem foolishly inclined to overlook : — 

" From thirteen to sixteen the blood is en- 
riched and heated ; desires arise ; images wander 
through the brain and the thoughts begin to clothe 
themselves. This is the dawn of the imagination, 
and the moment for bridling and guiding it 
properly is also the moment for giving the studies 
of the pupil a new direction and different matter 
to feed upon." 



THE AGE OF PUBERTY 209 

Wisdom which cannot, in truth, be too strongly 
emphasised. 

According to Napoleon, the age of puberty is 
that in which the poets, versifiers and artists are 
to be distinguished and separated from the 
mathematicians and the youths of pra:ctical mind 
— a theory which cannot fail to give unfortunate 
students of the classic Gepp much matter for 
retrospective thought. 

If anything, in our view, is calculated to demon- 
strate the essential atheism of Napoleon, we think 
it is to be found in the extraordinary publication, 
meant for general use in French schools, issued 
under the Emperor's auspices, and entitled The 
Imperial Catechism. By the Organic Articles of 
the Concordat, it was enacted that there should 
be only one liturgy and one catechism for the 
churches of France, and in order to settle once and 
for all the Erastian condition of the ecclesiastical 
power. Napoleon set his bureau de reclame to the 
task of putting God and the Clergy in their proper 
place. In pursuance of this idea, he had The 
Imperial Catechism published — with the im- 
primatur of the helpless Papal Legate — and issued 
in 1806. It is hardly necessary to say that the 
object of this Catechism was to rear the rising 
generation in Imperial ideas and to assure the 
future of Napoleon's dynasty. With his custom- 
ary forethought in all political adventures, the 
Emperor, before issuing his new book of religious 
instruction, had the opinion voiced, through 
his agent Portalis, that the large diversity in 



210 THE IMPERIAL EDUCATIONIST 

existing catechisms was wholly detrimental to 
the proper spiritual formation of French children. 
By basing his new catechism on that of Bossuet, 
as to its essential religious ideas, he was able to 
say that it was but a second edition of the old 
work of the Bishop of Meaux. The book was 
indeed pubhshed under the saintly protection of 
that long-departed prelate. 

Monsieur de Portalis, who was the chief Imperial 
agent in this matter, was not, it would seem, less 
unscrupulous than his master in mishandling 
religious teachings, or in reading them to his own 
purposes, and accordingly decided to execute his 
work in such a fashion that the new generation 
should have no doubts whatever as to the relative 
importance of Napoleon and the Almighty. A 
letter which he addressed to the Emperor in this 
connection is worth quoting; it is dated 13th 
February 1806 : 

"... At this moment the institutions of 
France may be said to have returned to their 
normal condition, and since Frenchmen have the 
happiness of living under the greatest of princes, 
I think that the time has come to bring to your 
Majesty's notice that part of the Catechism which 
deals with the relations of the subject to his 
sovereign. Before the new order of things much 
had been said on this matter, and teachers spoke 
in very vague terms of the submission which men 
owed to the chiefs of the State according to the 
words of the Gospel. It seems to me, Sire, that 
the time has gone for indulging in generahties of 



MONSIEUR DE PORTALIS 211 

such a nature, and it is now necessary to attach 
the conscience of the people to the august person 
of Your Majesty, whose rule and whose victories 
are guarantees of the safety and the prosperity of 
France. To recommend in a general way subjects 
to obey their sovereigns would not, in the present 
instance, be directing their obedience towards its 
proper end. Ordinary precepts may suffice in 
ordinary times, more especially when men are 
living in an order of things which has existed for 
a long time. But in these days the word sovereign 
is but a vague expression which each person de- 
fines according to his own lights and prejudices. 
I have therefore thought it necessary to inculcate 
new precepts with especial reference to Your 
Majesty's person. To do so will remove all am- 
biguity by fixing all hearts and minds on him who 
alone ought to be the object of their veneration." 
Portalis did not confine his loyal solicitude to 
the person of the Emperor, but drew up his Cate- 
chism in such a way that its doctrines must also 
form an enduring appeal on behalf of Napoleon's 
successors on the throne. The Emperor, we are 
sorry — if perhaps not surprised — to hear, read 
this letter with great pleasure ; with such obvious 
pleasure, indeed, that we are inclined to suspect 
that Portalis had been commanded to address it 
according to the terms stated. In the original 
catechism of Bossuet that prelate had written but 
a small paragraph which emphasised the subject's 
obligation of obedience to the sovereign, and the 
sovereign in those days had been Louis XIV. 



212 THE IMPERIAL EDUCATIONIST 

Napoleon was not so easily satisfied, however. 
Obedience to the authorities had by 1806 become 
the corner-stone of the new Imperial fabric, and 
here is what we find in the new book of religious 
instruction : 

Question : Is submission to the Government of 
France a dogma of the Church ? 

Answer: Yes. The Gospel teaches that he 
who disobeys the State disobeys God. The 
Church imposes upon us very especial obligations 
towards the Government of France, which protects 
religion and the Church. It commands us to 
love it, to cherish it and to be ready to make all 
possible sacrifices for its service. 

This particular passage the official theologians 
objected to, on the ground that it could not be 
reconciled with the claim of the Catholic or 
Universal Church to be the impartial mother of 
all nations. The Emperor agreed, but was, never- 
theless, insistent that his name should count for 
something in the Catechism, and accordingly a 
new dogma was interpolated after the following 
extraordinary fashion : — 

Question: What are the duties of Christians 
towards the princes who rule them, and, in par- 
ticular, what are our obligations to Napoleon I., 
our Emperor ? 

Answer : Christians owe to the princes under 
whom they live, and we owe in particular to our 
Emperor, Napoleon I., love, respect, obedience, 
loyalty, Military Service, the taxes necessary 
for the defence of the Empire and his throne, 



" MYSELF AND GOD " 213 

and fervent and frequent prayers for his prosperity 
and happiness and that of the State. 

Question : Why are we bound to fulfil all these 
obligations towards our Emperor ? 

Answer : In the first place, because God, who 
creates empires and distributes them according 
to His will, by endowing our Emperor with 
genius, whether for Peace or War, has given him 
to us for our Sovereign Lord, and has appointed 
him the instrument of His power upon Earth. 
Therefore when we honour and serve our Emperor, 
we are also honouring and serving God Himself. 
In the second place, because our Lord Jesus Christ, 
by His precept and example, has taught us what 
we owe to our sovereign. He was born in the 
time of Augustus and obeyed the laws of Augustus ; 
He paid the required tax ; He ordered us to 
give to God what belongs to God and to give to 
Csesar what belongs to Caesar. 

Question : Are there not some very special 
reasons which must strongly attach us to Napoleon 
I., our Emperor ? 

Answer : Yes, because he is the man whom God 
has raised up in difficult circumstances in order 
to re-establish the national Faith of our fathers, 
and to be its protector. He has brought back 
public order by his profound wisdom and energy ; 
he defends the State with his mighty arm ; he 
has become the anointed of the Lord through 
the consecration which he has received from the 
Sovereign Pontiff, the chief of the Universal 
Church. 



214 THE IMPERIAL EDUCATIONIST 

Question : What are we to think of those who 
fail in their duties towards our Emperor ? 

Answer : According to St Paul, the Apostle, 
such people would be capable of resisting God 
Himself and His established order, and are 
deserving of eternal damnation. 

Question : The obligations which we owe to 
our Emperor, do they not likewise bind us 
towards his legitimate successors according to 
the established Constitution of the Empire ? 

Answer : Most certainly they do ; for we read 
in the Scripture that God, Lord of Heaven and 
Earth, by an act of His supreme will, and by virtue 
of His fore-knowledge, grants kingdoms not only 
to one person in particular, but also to that 
person's family. 

Question : What is our duty towards our 
magistrates ? 

Answer : We must honour, respect and obey 
them, and this because they are the depositaries 
of the authority of our Emperor. 

Question : What other obligation are we bound 
to observe towards our rulers ? 

Answer : We are forbidden to disobey them, 
to do them harm, or to speak badly about 
them. 

The indefatigable Portalis did not allow his 
imperiomania to stop here. In a further letter 
addressed to Napoleon, he suggests that many 
reforms could be effected in the ritual, in the 
police regulations and bye-laws governing burials, 



CARDINAL CAPRARA 215 

marriages, the celebration of feasts, the perform- 
ance of sacramental rites — all of which, he says, 
are somewhat behind the times and fail of accord- 
ance with our new ways. 

It would serve little purpose to discuss the 
question whether the Cardinal-Legate, Caprara, 
then the agent of the Vatican in Paris, was, as 
has been asserted, a venal spirit wholly under the 
influence of the Corsican, and equally as atheistic 
as Napoleon himself, as was said. The Catechism, 
it is certain, honoured neither those who drew 
it up, nor the sovereign who allowed it to be 
published, and remains a lasting monument to 
Napoleon's contempt for the intelligence of com- 
moner mankind. 

In a few weeks after the publication of this-^^^ 
Catechism, with the Legate's imprimatur, the 
Emperor purchased a palace at Bologna from 
Caprara and paid the prelate's very heavy debts. 
This in addition to having appointed him Arch- 
bishop of Milan, thus drawing the Cardinal within 
the sphere of the intimate influence of the King of 
Italy, as the Corsican had also become. Napoleon 
was the last man in the world to neglect an advan- 
tage, and in making the extravagant claims which 
were advanced in the Imperial Catechism, fully 
realised, we may suppose, that his pretensions, 
being not less arrogant than those which the 
Church frequently claimed for the Vicars of Christ, 
could hardly be rejected by a Pope who virtually 
bespoke the politico-spiritual supremacy of the 
world. And accordingly we are not surprised 



216 THE IMPERIAL EDUCATIONIST 

to learn that the majority of the French Bishops 
— ^practically a band of Galileans malgre eux — 
appended the sigillum of their approval to an 
apotheosis which must have moved even CaUgula 
himself to mirth and mockery. 



CHAPTER XIII 
NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

The Press after Brumaire — Difference hettveen French 
and English Journalism — Wholesale Siippression of 
Sheets — Liberty of the Press ceases — Newspaper 
Morality — Napoleons Journalistic Precis — Monsieur 
Fievee, ChieJ Censor — Le Moniteur becomes Official 
Organ — Napoleons Private Paper — Value of Official 
Organs — Government's Duty to the Nation — L^icus a 
non Lucendo — A Nervspaper without Neivs — Monsieur 
Suard, Editor — Le Journal des Debats — Napoleon 
and Fractious Editors— Le Mercure de France — 
Monsieur de Chateaubriand — Napoleon s own Press 
Agency — Beugnot and the Emperor — Les Ideologues 
— La Route d'Antibes — The Adaptable Sub-Editor — 
The Hundred Days — Napoleons Opinion oj the Press 
— Caustic Remarks on Journalists and Writers — His 
Earliest Venture as a Newspaper-Owner — The Courrier 
de CArmee — Napoleons Personal Corps of Special 
Correspondents 



THE great day of Brumaire, by making 
Bonaparte master of the destinies of 
France, put a term to whatever Uberty 
the Press had up till then enjoyed. 
Many conditions combined to play into the hands 
of the new Dictator in respect of all matters 
connected with popular liberties, and not the 
least of these was the national weariness which 
looked, with perhaps an excusable enough resent- 
ment, on all movements which were likely to 
protract the general unrest attending upon the 
aftermath of the Revolution. The difference 
between French journalism and English journalism, 
then as now, has always lain in the fact that the 
former possesses a greater literary quality, and 
that therefore the personal equation counts for a 
larger force in French newspapers. Accordingly 
the fine work of the ideologue superabounded 
in the critical Press of Paris, and this was 
altogether opposed to Bonaparte's manner of 
considering the functions of a public institution. 
Shortly after the establishment of the Consul- 
ate, accordingly, Bonaparte, of his own initiative, 
issued the famous edict of 17th January 1800, 
suppressing all sheets in Paris which possessed 
a political bearing, with the exception of thirteen. 
The principal among the survivors were the 
Moniteur, the Journal des Debats, the Journal de 
Paris, the Gazette de France, This drastic enact- 
ment also went into operation in the Departments. 
Until that date there had been seventy-two 
political papers in Paris and about three times 

218 




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THE PRESS OF PARIS 219 

that number in the provinces. The Constitution 
of February, 1800, made next to no mention of the 
liberty of the Press, and, as we have said, patriots 
and philosophers were too wearied by the factious 
conditions of the Revolutionary decades to care 
much about the fate of an institution which, for all 
its potential might, neither politics nor society 
had ever taken au grand serieux. The lot of the 
dispossessed journalists excited, therefore, not the 
least concern, and it is recorded by Felix Rocquain 
that the general public saw with not a little 
Schadenfreude the removal to obscurity of a class 
of individuals who were notorious lovers of the 
limelight. 

In April of this first Consular year, Bonaparte 
instructed Fouch6 to supply him with a report 
concerning the character and disposition of the 
various editors left in charge of the surviving 
thirteen sheets. It was urged that their morality 
should be beyond any suspicion of being cor- 
ruptible — their political morality, obviously. A 
special department was established in the Ad- 
ministration, the object of which was to keep 
watch upon the newspaper offices, and it is 
interesting to note that this censorship was 
entrusted to prominent military men. The First 
Consul was daily supplied — Baron Fain has told 
us much anent this — with a precis of all that the 
newspapers were talking about, in much the same 
way as an important Minister is supplied by 
his personal secretary with a tabular digest of 
the morning's mail. The zeal of Fouch6 was 



220 NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

consequently not less under observation than the 
editors upon whom he was charged to report, an 
important consideration for Bonaparte, since his 
minister of police — an ex-Christian Brother — 
was supposed to represent the old Jacobin or 
extreme Revolutionary faction. And so, in order 
effectively to watch the watchman, the Consul 
appointed Fievee, formerly editor of the Gazette 
de France^ his private adviser on all journalistic 
matters. Fievee, it may be observed, remains 
best known to us by an aphorism which he is said 
to have fathered : " Politics, even in representa- 
tive governments, is what we do not talk about." ^ 
Ordinary newspaper readers received only a part 
of the truth from their sheets ; but Bonaparte 
received the whole truth from Fievee, and accord- 
ingly knew what, and what not, to suppress. 
Madame de Genlis and that Barere, on whom 
Macaulay lavished much of his high-class jour- 
nalese, were also paid spies who reported on the 
editors. 

The Moniteur became the official organ of 
the Consular political establishment, although 
a Bulletin de Paris was also established as an 
official sheet of the First Consul, the articles of 
which were written in his own cabinet, under his 
eyes, and often at his dictation. Despite this 
high patronage, however, the Bulletin had no 
circulation, and Fievee, an expert journalist, 
explained the reason of this to Bonaparte. 

^ We quote this aphorism simply, and without professing to see 
either its wit or its wisdom. 



BRITISH JOURNALISM 221 

" Official organs," he said, " are not worth the 
paper they are written on, and they are not a 
month old before everyone knows who edits them, 
as well as for whom and for what cause they are 
published. Intelligent Frenchmen will con- 
sequently not read them, more especially those 
who are looking for political guidance. They are 
read mainly by such as are anxious to know just 
what the Government thinks, and once readers 
find that official editors are seeking to form their 
political views, they revolt and go into direct 
opposition." 

Fievee goes on to point out that so long as 
governments fail to disclose their programmes 
frankly to the nation, a wholesome and educative 
type of journalism is not possible, and then 
addresses himself to the moral taught by British 
journalism. 

" Nothing," he says, " is easier than for the 
English v/riter to choose his side, for nothing 
fundamental is ever in discussion in that country, 
and all men know there what are the issues in 
dispute. But what is not in dispute in poor 
France ? We are supposed to be a Republic, 
which is not true ; we speak of liberty, yet have 
no liberty ; it is said that the Revolution has 
ended, when another is really about to start. No 
man tells the First Consul what he really thinks. 
Does the First Consul tell anyone what he thinks ? 
All this militates against a proper presentment 
of public and governmental opinion." 

In pursuance of his policy of reducing the Press 



222 NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

to the least possible significance as an institutional 
factor in the life of France, Bonaparte adopted a 
system of withholding from all but the official 
organs the various bulletins and police notices 
and reports which constituted, as " nouvelles et 
fails divers " — ^town talk and life's little incidents 
— almost the only resource of the dailies of that 
time. And the iron finality of his determination 
to discourage anything like individual enterprise 
on the part of a newspaper may be divined from 
the following extraordinary commandment, writ 
rubric in the office tablets : — 

" Whenever any news unfavourable to the 
Government becomes the subject of rumour, it 
must not be published until it is found by verifica- 
tion that it is already known to everybody." 

There was short shrift, as may be imagined, 
for all who failed in their observance of the new 
Press regulations. The Democratic Republican of 
Auch complains of the high prices of cereals at a 
time when Lucien Bonaparte and his brother 
Joseph were attempting to effect a corner in the 
grain market. Lucien was then Minister of the 
Interior and gives his instructions as follows : — 

"It is of the first consequence to destroy 
immediately so dangerous an instrument in the 
hands of agitators. I order you, therefore, to 
suppress this paper without any consideration 
whatsoever of loss or hurt to either editor or 
shareholders, and to arrest anyone who dares to 
show any sign of opposition to the authorities." 

Even ordinary literary criticism became a 



M. SUARD, REDACTEUR 223 

perilous pitfall for outspoken writers who thought 
that their functions did not stop at aesthetic 
discussions about style and art. The Ami des 
Lois was suppressed because a facetious reporter 
indulged his humour by making sarcastic remarks 
about the appearance and attitudes of a certain 
" meeting of men who honour the Republic " ; 
and even the Academy was to be treated as if its 
deliberations were as necessary to the lives of man- 
kind as the Immortals invariably thought them. 

One of the papers which had been authorised 
on the establishment of the Consulate was the 
Publiciste, whose editor Suard was a friend of 
Madame de Stael. This publication refused to 
print the official apology for the murder of the 
Due d'Enghien, and in the letter in which Suard 
took up his stand of honourable opposition to 
Bonaparte, he wrote, in effect : 

" I am now sixty years of age and, my character 
not having weakened with the years, I mean to 
finish my career as I have run it. The coup 
d'etat to which you ask me to subscribe I regard 
as an act of violence to all my notions of equity 
and political justice. My second objection is to 
the interference with properly constituted legal 
authorities in the trial of the Due d'Enghien, a 
summary act which puts the personal safety of 
all citizens at the mercy of arbitrary officials. I 
decline, therefore, to write against my convictions." 

The paper was given a new editor who received 
one-sixth of the revenue of the sheet as salary, 
the Government taking another one-sixth, the 



224 NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

remaining two-thirds going to Suard and the 
syndicate. The Journal des' Debats managed, 
by a poUey of tactful " trimming," as the 
Americans put it, to build up a prosperous cir- 
culation, during the Empire, its net revenue 
amounting to £8000 a year. This publication 
nevertheless voiced its abhorrence of the crime of 
Vincennes. 

When the Empire was established in 1804, 
Napoleon in his supplementary Constitution, 
known as the Senatus-Consultum, devoted a few 
clauses to a mention of the " liberty of the Press," 
seven Senators being appointed to safeguard the 
integrity of the new privileges granted to the 
Fourth Estate. For all this, the French Press 
of the new regime possessed no broader liberties 
than that of the Consulate, and Napoleon could 
still continue as of old to talk of " my Press." 
From the farther ends of Europe his letters to 
Fouche regarding the newspapers followed swiftly 
upon each other, and the minister of police was 
often urged to make his editors talk as they 
were told to talk, or else try some other line of 
commerce. 

" Je les reduirai a sept," Napoleon threatened, 
" et je conserverai, non ceux qui me loueront — 
je n'ai pas besoin de leurs eloges — mais ceux qui 
auront la touche male et le coeur frangais et qui 
montreront un veritable attachement pour moi 
et mon peuple." 

A distinguished contemporary tells us in one 
of his works that he knows of a famous American 



THE IMPERIAL IDEA 225 

newspaper proprietor who is accustomed to speak 
of his writers as prostitutes. Evidently Napoleon's 
opinion of a race of but poorly appreciated and 
inadequately rewarded workers was on much the 
same plane, for in his letters to Otranto we find 
such expressions as : 

" Let X, the editor, know that I intend to 
settle his account." 

Or : " birds of evil augury, how comes it that 
they only prophesy calamities so far ahead ? " 

Or : " it is a bit too much of a farce to have 
a Press which has the disadvantage of freedom 
without any of its advantages." 

Or : " all articles, little as well as big, must be 
good articles " — meaning Imperial — " and I am 
not the man to allow journalists to draw high 
profits from papers that do me nothing but 
harm." 

In October, 1805, the Emperor forced the Journal 
des Debats to change its title to Journal de V Empire, 
and annexed £3300 of its net revenue of £8000, 
with the unexpected result, for Napoleon, that 
the circulation of the paper increased by half. 

The famous Mercure de France and the 
Publiciste also become the objects of Napoleon's 
anger : 

" Monsieur le due d'Otrante," he writes, " I 
have read an article in the Publiciste which 
appears to be a frank write-up for the Spanish 
monks. Give the editor to understand that he 
runs the risk of having his paper suppressed. Let 
him insert articles which depict the ferocity of 



226 NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

these monks, their ignorance and their ineffable 
hetiser 

It was in the Mercure that appeared some of 
the first fragments of Chateaubriand's Genie 
du Christianisme, The author, who had thrown 
up a diplomatic secretaryship, it will be remem- 
bered, as a protest against the murder of Enghien, 
made no attempt to disguise his opinion that a 
reincarnation of Nero had taken place, but that 
Tacitus having also come back to earth, the reign 
of the tyrant could not be for long. Napoleon's 
answer was the appointment of Legouve as censor 
of the Mercure, and Guizot remarks hereanent : 

" Even Napoleon could not allow it to be said 
that his future historian would appear during his 
reign, and so had to take the reputation of Nero 
under his protection." 

The new Tacitus was, of course, Chateaubriand. 

In 1809 the Emperor gave orders that from 
that time onward, only one newspaper in each 
department should be allowed to deal with 
political matters. The prefect would, of course, 
decide as to the choice of the organ. By 1811 
there were only four authorised papers in Paris 
— the Moniteur, the Journal de VEmpire, the 
Gazette de France and the Journal de Paris, The 
Mercure and the Publiciste had been summarily 
suppressed. By a decree dated from Compiegne, 
17th September 1811, all existing newspapers 
were confiscated as being really the property of 
the Government, the entire plant of the Debats 
{Journal de VEmpire) being taken over, and the 



'' CES IDEOLOGUES ! " 227 

syndicate reorganised to the drastic extent tliat 
even the proprietors were not inckided among the 
new shareholders. Neither were they indemnified. 
From that time till 1814, the Press was simply 
the voice of the Master. 

Need the modern world then be sm^prised to 
hear, in our own age of personal reclame, that 
Napoleon, over a century ago, had founded his 
own personal press agency known as the bureau 
de Vesprit public, or agency for promoting public 
opinion. Was not Caesar's Acta Diurna — a kind 
of daily record — supposed to be a bit of frank 
press-agency work compiled on behalf of the 
authorities ? Napoleon's bureau sought to prop- 
agate among the authorised newspapers all and 
everything in the way of ideas that the Emperor 
thought necessary for the support of his throne, 
and was an obvious attempt at just such organised 
obscurantism as Berlin has made us so familiar 
with during the Great War of 1914. 

In another place we have shown how Madame 
de Stael came under the ban of Imperial policies 
because that illustrious woman had dared to raise 
her voice in the cause of human liberty. " It is 
to ideology," cried the Emperor, " and to all 
such tenebreuse ynetaphysique that France has 
owed all her misfortunes." Beugnot suggests that 
there are certain periods when it is necessary 
that ideas should be expressed. 

"I understand you," roars the irate Emperor; 
" yes, that is just one of the mottoes of your 
school." 



228 NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

" I have no other school," rephes the courtly 
Beugnot, " but the school of the Emperor." 

" That is only a phrase — nothing more ! You 
are of the same school of ideologues as Roederer, 
Regnault and my brother Louis and Fontanes. 
No, I forgot — Fontanes belongs to another school 
of idiots. But," and Napoleon touches the hilt 
of his sword, " so long as this hangs at my side, 
you shall know none of those liberties after 
which your soul aspires — not even. Monsieur 
Beugnot, the liberty of giving those pretty little 
addresses of yours in Parliament." 

Chateaubriand's famous pamphlet, Bonaparte 
et les Bourbons, appeared when the Royalists were 
moving all they could to effect a compromise 
between the Imperial and their own factions, and 
was, on account of its violence and hatred of 
Napoleon, a source of much annoyance to those 
who were seeking to bring all parties to an 
understanding. In a certain degree it may be 
said to have laid the lines of the long intrigue 
which was to bring back Bonaparte from Elba, 
since its tone provided the inspiration for the 
scores of revived sheets which leaped into light 
and forced the authorities to be hardly less in- 
tolerant of the newspapers than Bonaparte had 
been in his time. *«In the interests of public 
tranquillity," declared Fouche, "we must muzzle 
these hydrophobes of the Fourth Estate." And 
the soundest minds in France favoured the 
exercise of the censorship at that critical hour. 

The manner in which the newspapers of the day 



ELBA— ANTIBES— PARIS 229 

reported the triumphant advance of Napoleon, 
after his landing at Antibes, on the return from 
Elba, has often been cited as providing a very- 
succinct commentary on the weakness of ordinary- 
human nature in the presence of the wonderful. 
The successive newspaper bulletins read : 

First day : The Corsican tyrant has landed at 
the Gulf of Juan. 

Second day : Grenoble has opened its gates to 
the bloody usurper. 

Third day : Bonaparte has made his entry into 
Lyons. 

Fourth day : General Bonaparte has won over 
a division of the Royal Army. 

Fifth day : Napoleon is now only ninety miles 
from Paris. 

Sixth day : The Emperor Napoleon arrived last 
night at Fontainebleau. 

Seventh day : His Majesty the Emperor entered 
the Tuileries at half-past eight last evening. 

For all the doubts that have been cast on 
Napoleon's sincerity in respect of his concessions 
to journalism, on his return from Elba, some 
writers of the day appear to think that his 
meditations on his own downfall, while in exile, 
had led him to the conclusion that, with the Press 
on his side, he might have secured his throne 
during the first reign. It is certain that on his 
return from Elba the newspapers enjoyed a 
freedom of expression which they had never before 
known. To Benjamin Constant Napoleon said : 

" The liberty of the Press is above all an 



230 NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

essential in wise government. To seek to suppress 
it is absurd — of that I am convinced." 

In opening the Chambers he declared again that 
the liberty of the Press was a capital consideration 
in the new programme for France, with which he 
had returned from Elba, and even when certain 
journals began to advocate the assassination of 
their well-wisher, Napoleon took no action to 
limit their candour. The Journal Universel at 
Ghent drew a pretty parallel between Cain and 
the Corsican — much to the latter' s disadvantage ; 
yet no move was made to oppose its appearance 
twice a week. 

Napoleon himself declared at St Helena that 
the newspapers counted for nothing in his fall. 
The Press, he said, was one of those institutions 
which need not be discussed as to the good or evil 
which they do in a nation. The main concern 
of governments is this : can public opinion be 
opposed in curtailing the liberties of the Press ? 
His own experience, he admitted, had taught him 
that to curtail those liberties had been a blunder, 
and accordingly, when he returned from Elba, 
it was with the firm intention of allowing news- 
papers to say what they liked. 

It seems fairly clear, then, that Napoleon was 
no friend of the Press in the earlier days of his 
triumphant progress, and it must be admitted that 
his treatment of that institution lessens to a great 
extent the opinion we have been taught to enter- 
tain about his marvellous prevision in political 
and diplomatic matters. Even Joseph and Louis 



BONAPARTE : EDITOR 231 

Bonaparte, who were perhaps the least endowed 
as poHticians of this wonderful family, had 
solemnly warned him betimes that the already- 
powerful newspaper world was one which would 
brook neither mishandling nor indifference on his 
part, only to receive the famous reply : 

" You fools attach far too much importance to 
the society and opinion of journalists and literary 
men. That class of individuals is made up of just 
so many coquettes whom it may be wise to play 
with, but whom we should never dream of making 
either our wives or our ministers." 

The soldier, as a rule — and the truth has been 
very fully impressed upon us in these later times 
— is ever jealous of the writer, and from his very 
first debuts as a general, Bonaparte had been made 
to feel that there was one force which all the 
militarism in the world was powerless to muzzle 
or coerce. Even while in Italy, during his first 
important campaign, he had founded a journal 
which lasted for two years and was known as the 
Courrier de VArmee d'ltalie. In this publication 
was at various times forecast the vast programme 
which Napoleon subsequently carried out for his 
own aggrandisement and that of France, and a 
perusal of its first numbers leaves one with the 
impression that Bonaparte had brought it into 
existence more with a view to showing the 
Directory that, with his advent, their supreme 
power had finally departed, than with any hope 
of affecting public opinion to a very important ex- 
tent. ''To defend liberty and its friends against 



232 NAPOLEON AND JOURNALISM 

the partisans of tyranny and terror " was the 
chief aim of its founders, as it stated in the first 
issue. The Courrier made its appearance twice 
a week when first started, but its main object 
once achieved — namely, the warnings addressed 
to the Directory — the pubhcation became some- 
what irregular. 

Napoleon, as M. de Narbonne informs us, had 
special correspondents in nearly every country 
in Europe, and certainly in all the important 
centres of France and Italy, who transmitted 
to himself all sorts of information regarding 
the state of public opinion, the tendencies, 
intrigues and intentions of publicists, salons, 
clerics and speculators. M. de Villemain also 
tells us how on one occasion the Emperor, 
towards the close of his reign, addressed himself 
to an audience at the Tuileries with especial 
reference to the " vulgar outspokenness " of 
certain sections of the Press which were already 
growing bold enough to preach ideas about " the 
beginning of the end," and in such a way, Napoleon 
said, as to make him blush for the nation. This 
was in 1813, when the end was unmistakably in 
sight. 



CHAPTER XIV 
BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 



Bonaparte attracts de Stael — Bonaparte s Natural 
Antipathy for Corinne — Augereaii and Madame — 
Chez M. de Talleyrand — Constant and Corinne — 
Benjamins Little Inadvertence — De Stael and her 
Spokesman — Intrigues against Bonaparte — High 
Political Ambitions — Une Femme incomprise — Her 
Work on Literature — Constant is dismissed — De 
Stael' s Comment — Bernadotte and Corinne — Delphine 
appears — Bonaparte s Comments — A Pen-Portrait oj 
Corinne — Madame at Weimar jin Vienna and Stockholm 
— Coriniies Regard for England — Her Son Augustus 
— Some Fatherly Advice — Projected Visit to America 
— De I'Allemagne — A Machine a Mouvement — 
Napoleon disgusted with her Views — Goethe and de 
Stael's Work on Germany — The Visit to Russia — 
^' The Conscience of Europe " — Stein and de Stael — 
Her Essay on Suicide — Goes to London — Byron s 
Opinion of Corinne — Death in 1817 — Gourgaud and 
Madame — Napoleons Impartial Opinion of her 
Qualities 



ALTHOUGH Madame de Stael had not 
met Bonaparte until his arrival in 
Paris, 5th December 1797, at the close 
of the Italian campaign, she had begun 
to correspond with him shortly after the young 
soldier had proved his supreme military quality 
by winning the battle of Lodi. Even her 
early letters to Bonaparte overflowed with an 
enthusiasm which reflects little credit on the 
womanly taste of the chatelaine of Coppet, and 
if it be true that great artists are too self-centred 
to care very much about the proprieties, then 
Madame de Stael was certainly a first-class type 
of the artistic race. In the earliest of these 
effusions addressed to the soldier at Milan, the 
lady attributes to him all the virtues of "Scipio 
and Tancred combined, possessing the simplicity 
of the latter and the brilliancy of the former." 
In a third epistle to the celebrity whom she had 
not yet met, she shows how far her enthusiasm 
is capable of carrying her. Bonaparte was in 
those days, it was well known, still very much 
in love with Josephine, and we may imagine his 
surprise on hearing from de Stael that his union 
with " an insignificant little Creole, unworthy and 
incapable of appreciating him, is nothing short 
of monstrous." 

" That creature is mad, Bourrienne," cries Bona- 
parte to the secretary, who records the fact in his 
Memoires, vol. vi., " and I shall certainly not reply 
to such letters. Fancy a blue-stocking, a maker 
of romances, comparing herself with Josephine ! " 

234 



A DANGEROUS WOMAN 235 

Even the uncouth soldier Augereau is said to 
have taken the measure of the lady, who pestered 
him with questions as to Bonaparte's love of 
Liberty, his ideals and his personality. Discussing 
his ambition, she asks if it is true that he has an eye 
on the crown of Lombardy, and Augereau' s reply 
evokes a titter at the garrulous woman's expense : 

" No, indeed," he says, " he is much too well 
bred a young man to entertain such notions." 

When at last she meets Bonaparte, who was 
calling on Talleyrand, then Minister for Foreign 
Affairs, the young General, after a kindly word 
about her father, turns away quickly, as if he 
feared an impromptu harangue. She on her 
part begins to Spier the Conqueror, but remains 
silent and apparently troubled. In the immedi- 
ate sequel, all de Stael's attempts to attach 
the young General — she was some three years 
his senior — to her own coterie were to meet with 
failure, and he refuses politely but firmly to attend 
even her receptions — a refusal which is explained 
by biographers of both celebrities on the ground, 
first, that he disliked — as most really masculine 
men dislike — anything like the affectation of 
esprit fort on the part of a woman, a type with 
which recent hermaphroditic decades have made 
ourselves so familiar. In the second place, Bona- 
parte was well aware that a partisan of de Stael's 
political activity was quite capable of com- 
promising him with the Directory, whose suspicion 
as regards himself, and his intentions, he was far 
from wishing, at that time, to arouse. 



236 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

It was at a fete given by Talleyrand — according 
to Lucien Bonaparte, on the great revolutionary 
day of Brumaire — that Bonaparte, the centre of a 
circle of admirers, was asked by de Stael to name 
the greatest woman known to history. 

" The woman who has had the most children," 
replies the General with admirable wisdom and 
in a taste which accorded sufficiently well, we 
may suppose, with the ambiguous society of the 
new regime. A few days afterwards, again, when 
the ipersistent pre cieuse chooses a dramatic moment 
to ask him if he likes women, Bonaparte replies 
that he loves his wife — a retort the real value 
of which altogether loses its effect in the English 
rendering. Madame de Stael did not miss the 
point, however, and, in order probably to cover 
her chagrin, affected to see its sublimity : 

" Epaminondas would have given me the same 
answer," she tells Lucien, who was a very close 
ally, and who records Madame' s opinion here- 
anent in the second volume of his Memoires, By 
the beginning of 1799 de Stael had to admit that 
she had never met a man of Bonaparte's kind or 
character, and in January of that year she decides 
to return to Switzerland, there to set about some 
work or other which is, she thinks, to prove 
unfailingly to Bonaparte her possession of a 
genius for politics with which France shall have 
to reckon. She returned to Paris and was present, 
as we have seen, on the day of the overthrow of 
the Directory. Her devotion to the cause of 
Bonaparte, enthusiastically expressed in all her 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT 237 

letters, arose, says Gautier, from her inability to 
see that the successful General of the Revolution 
was now playing for his own hand — a mistake 
which Sieyes, Benjamin Constant, Roederer and 
many other ardent Republicans also made. 

Benjamin Constant entered so intimately into 
the life of de Stael that it is impossible to separate 
the couple. We cannot, accordingly, overlook a 
story of Constant, told by Aime-Martin and 
Chabaud, when de Stael sought to use her influence 
for the promotion of her fellow-countryman and 
lover. As the Tribunal was about to be organised, 
Constant presented himself chez Bonaparte and 
requested a seat in the new Assembly. 

" You must know," said Benjamin, " that I 
am entirely devoted to your service, and am not 
one of those ideologues who want to run the world 
on theories — ^like Sieyes, for instance. Mine is a 
positive, an objective mind, and if you appoint 
me, you can rely altogether on my loyalty." 

The new Constitution had not yet been drawn 
up, and it occurred to Constant, on leaving 
Bonaparte, that as Sieyes lived nearly opposite 
the General, it might be just as well to pay a 
friendly visit to the ex-Abbe, who received him 
cordially. 

" I should be glad," said Constant to his host, 
"to be appointed to the Tribunat, and hope not 
to seem unworthy of that honour in your eyes. 
You know I hate force and am no friend of the 
sword. What I want is principles, ideals, justice, 
and if you will help me, you can rely altogether 



238 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

on my loyalty, for, let me assure you, I frankly 
detest Bonaparte." 

Constant had strangely overlooked the im- 
portant fact that Chabaud, who had been present 
when he met Bonaparte across the road, had also 
in the meantime come over to pay a diplomatic 
visit to Sieyes, and remained unobserved while 
Benjamin made his new act of political faith to 
the Abbe. 

Constant was, however, ultimately appointed 
to the Tribunat, and Madame de Stael and her 
lover at once came to the conclusion that Bona- 
parte had nominated him through fear of the 
influence exerted by her writings and salon. 
Accordingly de Stael thought the moment oppor- 
tune to start her intrigues for ridding the Govern- 
ment of Bonaparte and inaugurating a regime 
of republican liberty — a condition of affairs which 
was not likely for long to escape the observation 
of the new chief of the State. Bonaparte sends 
his brother Joseph to reason with the intriguante, 
offering even to repay her father's loans to 
Louis XVI. — Si sum amounting, with the interest 
for over fourteen years, to about £150,000. But 
Corinne is not thinking of money. What she 
wants is an acknowledgment by Bonaparte that 
her political role is not a negligible one, and her 
answer is given in a speech delivered by Constant 
and inspired by herself, which amounts to an 
attack on the Consular regime and its monarchical 
tendencies. Bonaparte replies by letting loose 
the furies of his own Press and inspiring to the 



JEERING JACOBINS 239 

limit of invective the Press of the RoyaHsts and also 
that of the Jacobins. These all abhorred Madame 
de Stael with an intensity the causes of which may 
be sought in the outrageous persistency with which 
she clamorously sought the attention of an age 
which was but slightly acquainted with the political 
female. Even this Press campaign she turns to her 
policy of personal reclame and assumes the role 
of persecuted woman, assuring Roederer, among 
a score of correspondents, that no woman has 
ever suffered as she has suffered — a common 
delusion of unwomanly and dishonest women. A 
short time afterwards she receives unequivocal 
orders to go into residence at Saint-Ouen, where 
she has a chateau, a foretaste of complete exile 
which to some extent saves her rather homely 
face, for, acting under orders, the Talleyrands, the 
Bonapartes, the Beauharnais and other families 
had long since ceased to visit her salon in Paris. 

When at the instance of friends, the interdict 
is raised and she returns to Paris, it is not, as 
might be hoped, to efface herself and devote the 
tedious hours to literary work. She moves every 
influence she knows with the object of being ad- 
mitted to the presence of Bonaparte. He curtly 
suggests that Madame de Stael, who lives in great 
luxury, should make a small allowance to her 
husband, at that time starving in Switzerland. 
Nor does the First Consul improve matters by 
making cynical remarks on the private life of 
Corinne, who, it will be remembered, was at all 
times all things to all men — or nearly so. In 



240 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

1800 she published her work, De la Litterature, in 
which, while the name of the First Consul is not 
once mentioned, the fierce attacks upon his 
policies are clear as sunlight. Naturally, he was 
irritated, but prudence forbade him showing his 
anger, for even at that date, as Chateaubriand 
tells us, his newly acquired power was far from 
possessing the stability one would imagine from 
a study of historical records. The battle of 
Marengo had not yet consolidated him in his 
omnipotency, and although his subsidised Press 
said all he thought — and, indeed, more — of 
Corinne's new work, Bonaparte himself took 
no action against the enemy. He waited till 
1802, when he eliminated a score or so of red 
Republicans from the Trihunat, among them 
being de StaePs own mouthpiece, Benjamin 
Constant, through whom, in her serious opinion, 
she was destined to place herself on level political 
terms with Bonaparte. So much for political 
womankind ! 

" Le Premier Consul,'' she declared, on hearing 
of this despotic act, " n'a pas epure, mais ecreme 
le Tribunal,'' and went on to talk of Bonaparte as 
an " ideophobe," 

" That sentiment is Madame de Stael's, cer- 
tainly," says the elegant Corsican, when told 
of her mot, "I could smell her a mile away. 
Ideophobe, does she say ? Why not hydrophobe ? 
Ah ^a — but who could govern with people like 
that about ! " 

And Talleyrand — son ancien, her cast-off — ^is 



ENTER DELPHINE ! 241 

given instructions to tell Madame to place a 
sentinel over her big mouth. There is no 
possible question of a reconciliation between 
this strange couple after the enactments of the 
Concordat and the Life-Consulship, both of which 
clearly show to what lengths Bonaparte is pre- 
pared to go, and de Stael, Constant and the old 
Republican patriots finally realise how cleverly 
they had been tricked by the simple student- 
conqueror who returned from Italy in 1797 with 
the Treaty of Campo Formio in his satchel. It 
is now beyond doubt established that de Stael 
counted for an important equation in the con- 
spiracy in which Bernadotte engaged before the 
passing of the Concordat. Corinne charged the 
future King of Sweden with hesitancy if not 
cowardice : 

" Hurry up," she wrote, " you have only a 
short time in which to act. To-morrow the 
tyrant will have forty thousand priests in his 
service." 

The appearance of Delphine about this time 
was another blow at the system of Bonaparte, 
whose ambition had early divined its great 
opportunity in the wholesale restoration of order 
which it was in his power to effect within the 
community. And on no established social 
institution had he calculated to this end more 
than upon the marriage contract, which he 
rightly looked upon as the keystone of national 
life — the surest guarantee of order within the 
State. Delphine had a vast success on its 



242 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

appearance ; it is frankly the story of a femme 
incomprise, a type of woman who, it seems to us, 
is never sure of what she wants — when it is not 
a man — and whose hfe seems to be one long 
pilgrimage spent in a vain quest of the male ideal 
— indeed, a kind of devanciere of those polyand- 
rous females with whom Georges Sand has made 
us so familiar. 

" Very false, immoral and altogether anti- 
social," cries Bonaparte, who in commenting on 
its special pleadings for easy divorce, delivers 
himself of some elegant remarks about the private 
life of Madame. Nor did he fail to inspire the 
scribes of his subsidised Press. The critic of the 
Mercure de France speaks of women of the type 
of Delphine, who, it need hardly be said, represents 
Madame de Stael herself, in the following strain : — 

" Such creatures are simply animals in their 
lustfulness and their passions, and it is much 
harder to be their friends than their lovers. . . . 
Look at them, and you will find that they are 
invariably great, fat, gross, full-blooded women 
who, externally at least, give no indication of the 
soul-tortures which they affect to undergo " — all 
of which bears the impress of the Corsican's style 
and method of invective. 

When exiled in 1803, Madame betakes herself 
to Germany and at Weimar meets Goethe and 
Wieland, the former of whom introduces his 
friend Schlegel, and this worthy man undertakes 
to form the lady's ideas as regards his country, 
its institutions and inhabitants. Schlegel even 



ENTER CORINNE ! 248 

accompanies his pupil to Vienna, to Stockholm, 
to Petersburg, and acts in the capacity of secretary 
and press-agent, with the especial duty of giving 
to all the capitals which they visit a true picture 
of the tyrant of the Tuileries. While she is in 
Germany, the establishment of the Empire takes 
place, and de Stael sets about a new campaign, 
the object of which is to detach the old French 
nobility from the service of Napoleon, an attempt 
in which she is only partially successful, since 
great families like that of La Rochefoucauld, of 
Remusat, of Montmorency, of Turenne and Segur 
have shown no objection whatever to join the 
Corsican's establishment, and all the more so 
because the astute upstart places a premium on 
their ability to show his own ennobled parvenus 
how to play the complete courtier. 

Napoleon, whose Cabinet Noir is ever on the 
alert, intercepts every letter written by his enemy 
and there is consequently no detail of her intrigues 
with which he is not acquainted. Madame does 
not even suspect the Emperor's espionage and 
is stirred " almost to convulsions " when on 
requesting permission to reside near Paris, she is 
ordered to remove nearer to the frontier. Nor 
does the appearance of Corinne improve the 
relations of the twain : Napoleon accuses her of 
being frankly anti-French and correspondingly 
Anglophile, for Corinne is one long paean of the 
English character and all its peculiar virtues, 
which spring, she maintains, from such free 
political institutions as enable them to flourish. 



244 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

And to the accusation that she has dehberately 
depreciated the French character, de Stael repHes 
that she only represents the " abaissement des 
caracteres dans Vetat social'' — which the Corsican's 
despotism has dehberately brought about. 

In 1808 Napoleon indicated in very clear terms 
his reasons for treating Madame de Stael as a 
public enemy and for keeping her in exile. All 
her Paris friends having failed of inducing the 
Emperor to allow the lady to reside in the Capital, 
her son, Augustus, a schoolboy of seventeen, 
decided himself to seek an interview with Napoleon 
and endeavour to move his pity. The Emperor 
was on his way back from Italy and young de 
Stael, knowing that he would pass through 
Chambery, awaited his coming in that city. On 
being told the object of the boy's visit. Napoleon, 
one is pleased and, indeed, not surprised to hear, 
consents to see him while he is breakfasting 
at a hotel, and grants the youth an audience of 
nearly an hour. The Emperor does not, he himself 
says, consider Madame de Stael a bad woman, but 
only a woman who will not submit to authority, 
and he must insist on being obeyed. She could 
not curb her tongue, and though she may not 
attach much importance to what she says. 
Napoleon does, since he knows for how much 
she counts in public opinion. 

" I have to take things very seriously," he 
tells the boy, " and if I were to allow your mother 
to return to Paris, within six months I should have 
to imprison her. I should be sorry to have to do 



THE AMERICAN TOUCH 245 

so, since I must suffer for it in the opinion of 
the public. ... As for you, jeune homme, stick 
to the right path in poHtics, for I shall not easily 
forgive a Necker. Paris, you must see, is my 
home, and there I can tolerate only those who 
respect me. If I allowed your mother to come 
to Paris, she would very soon lose me all my 
friends. Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, 
even London — all these cities are open to her. 
She has only to choose." 

After that, and as she found herself more closely 
watched at Coppet, there was nothing for it but 
America, and at one time she seriously thought 
of going there. An American newspaper, hear- 
ing of the likelihood of the great Corinne visiting 
" these shores," comments thereon in character- 
istic superlatives : 

"She is a tremendously wealthy woman and 
lives in extremely splendid and decorous style at 
her very elegant mansion. The famous woman 
has also written several books which, having a 
large circulation in Europe, undoubtedly bring 
her in good moneys 

" The savages ! " cries Madame de Stael when 
she reads this exquisite Press notice. 

All literary Europe knew by this time that her 
work on Germany, to which she had given six 
years' close labour, was already in the hands of 
the printers; and the critics, not less than the 
connoisseurs and politicians, were all on the alert 
for its appearance. Ten thousand copies had 
already been struck off by the publisher when 



246 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

Napoleon gave orders to Savary — then Minister 
of Police — to suppress the whole issue. Her 
son preserved the manuscript, however, and the 
work was eventually published in London by 
John Murray, in 1813. 

" I am sending you," Napoleon wrote to 
Savary, " the work of Madame de Stael. Has she 
the right to describe herself as a Baroness ? Did 
she adopt this title in previous works ? Suppress 
the passage relating to the Duke of Brunswick, 
and three-fourths of what she has to say in praise 
of England. She has done us enough harm in 
this respect." 

Even now de Stael, with that never-failing self- 
delusion which marks her relations with Napoleon, 
solicits permission in an eloquent letter to the 
Emperor to be allowed to reside in Paris : 

"Why should I blush," she cries, '*to ask for 
friendship, poetry, music, painting and all that 
ideal existence which I can enjoy without refusing 
obedience to the sovereign of France ? " 

Napoleon is said to have been touched by 
this appeal, but was true to his conviction that 
Madame de Stael was too much a machine a 
mouvement to be trusted in such susceptible 
poUtical salons as those of Paris. 

Constant, in his Memoirs, tells us how Napoleon, 
after reading a certain passage in De VAllemagne, 
threw the work on the fire and gave orders that 
Madame was to be more strictly watched than 
ever. There is little doubt that the Emperor 
suppressed the book on general principles, as 



A FEMALE TACITUS 247 

they say, and without having made any especial 
study of the ideas it set forth. Nor can it be 
doubted that he not only directed but even 
stimulated the zeal of those to whom he had 
assigned the task of spying on de Stael and her 
movements. This work, it may be observed, was 
an unequivocal appeal to the Germanic nations 
to throw off the yoke which had oppressed them 
since 1806, to organise their resources, to learn 
the lessons that England and the Peninsula were 
then teaching to the enslaved Continent, and to 
be prepared against the hour which was at hand 
when the awakening peoples would turn and rend 
their oppressor. Even Goethe, in February, 1814 
— when his friend Napoleon was obviously on the 
eve of his first collapse — could write to his corre- 
spondent, Madame von Grotthus : " The French 
police, intelligent enough to realise that a work like 
De VAllemagne must have the effect of building 
up the confidence of the Germans in themselves, 
prudently suppressed it. Even at this very hour 
it is producing an astonishing effect." It is not 
difficult, therefore, to understand why Napoleon 
refused to allow this modern female Tacitus to 
place her new De Morihus before a Germany 
which was only awaiting an auspicious moment 
to raise the banners of reasoned — and honourable 
— revolt. 

In 1812 Madame de Stael made her memorable 
visit to Russia, and was already in Moscow when 
the Napoleonic armies were advancing on 
Smolensk. The great society of the old capital 



248 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

failed to understand Madame, although they were 
willing to do her reverence, first, as the enemy of 
Napoleon, and, secondly, as the great representa- 
tive of the " conscience of Europe." Even semi- 
barbaric Muscovy found Corinne heavy of form 
and unpleasing of face — " too big for a woman and 
built like a man," as Arndt put it. Nor did they 
think her style of dress becoming in a woman 
already approaching her fiftieth year ; " her dis- 
courses are too long and her sleeves too short," 
said a sententious member of the Rostopchin 
family, who also describes the amusing way in 
which our elephantine Egeria and Baron Stein 
used to caramboler together on the sofa when 
discussing the iniquities of the latter-day Nero. 
From Moscow de Stael proceeds to Stockholm, 
where she finds her old friend- Bernadotte already 
Crown Prince of Sweden and quite as cordially 
disposed towards her as in the early days of the 
First Consulate. 

Here she resumes her literary activities and an 
avalanche of pamphlets is the result, in which 
Bernadotte is extolled as Europe's only hope 
against Napoleon. Schlegel's essay on Napoleon's 
Continental system appears about the same time, 
and Napoleon, not less than the connoisseurs, is 
perfectly well aware that Madame de Stael is the 
inspiration behind this attack on himself and his 
system. Even in her short Essay on Suicide she 
finds it impossible to avoid giving expression to 
her political views, and accordingly assails the sort 
of egoism that allows no enthusiasm to live which 




Photograph : IF. A. Mansell Qy Co. 



MADAME DE STAEL 

1804 

After the paitttitt}! by Gudefruy 



BYRON AND MADAME 249 

finds its source in ideas of liberty and independ- 
ence. She attacks the type of Christianity which, 
bending before the tyrant, remains satisfied with 
its own slavery, and finally deplores the " fashion 
of suicide," almost vulgarised since Werther, 
throughout Germany, and points out that death 
in battle against despotism is a far worthier way 
of quitting life. And not satisfied with working 
herself against the enemy, she induces her bride- 
groom husband, Rocca, to write his experiences 
of the French campaign in Spain — a frank ex- 
position of Napoleon's inhuman methods when 
carrying war into hostile countries. Monsieur de 
Rochechouart tells us, too, that until Madame de 
Stael had suggested its possibility to him, Bema- 
dotte had never conceived the idea of succeeding 
Napoleon as Emperor of the French. 

In London, where she resided on leaving Sweden, 
all society rushed to her salon, and among the 
many historic names on her visiting list, we note 
that of Byron, then in his twenty-fifth year, who 
quickly wearied of the voluble lady and declared 
that if her books were in octavo style, her eloquence 
was certainly m. folio, Murray published her book, 
De V Allemagne, in 1813, and the result of the battle 
of Leipzig proved to Englishmen that they were 
entertaining a prophetess, for she had foretold 
Napoleon's collapse when Germany's national 
conscience should awaken. On 8th May 1814, 
while Napoleon is making his way to Elba, de 
Stael returned to Paris, in broken health, and not 
unmoved at the fate of the Corsican, whom, for 



250 BONAPARTE versus DE STAEL 

all her opposition, she never ceased to look upon 
as the only hero of the modern world. Napoleon, 
indeed, on his return from Elba recognised that 
she had been kinder to him in his misfortune than 
she had ever proved during his prosperity, and 
in the hope of attaching her to his new constitu- 
tional ideas, expressed his desire for an under- 
standing, admitting that she had made him more 
enemies during her exile than she could have done 
had he allowed her to remain in France. It is 
also said that Napoleon gave her to understand 
that her old claim on the French Treasury should 
be settled, and in the Memorial, chapter iii., 
Madame de Stael is represented as addressing a 
letter to the Emperor, conceived in the most 
fulsome terms, in which in consideration of 
receiving her millions, she offers to devote her 
pen and her principles for ever to Napoleon— a 
charge which may, we think, be dismissed, as 
well as Gourgaud's statement to the same effect. 
Says this very naif aide-de-camp, who might 
well, indeed, have posed for the picture of the 
imperishable Brigadier Gerard, in volume ii. of 
his Memoirs : 

" She gave me to understand that if I could 
induce the Treasury to pay over her millions, 
she would write anything / wanted." And then 
airily : " J^ V envoy ai promener—I sent her about 
her business." 

On the second return of Louis XVIII. Madame 
de Stael played a more important role in Court 
and general society than she had done even 



HER EPITAPH 251 

during the first restoration — a fact which seems 
to give the lie to the charge that she had been 
willing to sell herself to Napoleon. At St Helena, 
in 1817, the death of this great woman moved the 
tactless Gourgaud to remind the fallen Emperor 
that her world role had been epitomised in the 
description of Europe's great Entente between 
1805 and 1815 as " Britain, Russia and Madame 
de Stael." 

" She was a woman," said Napoleon, with real 
justice, " of very great powers of mind." 



CHAPTER XV 

BIOGI— CHATEAUBRIAND 
STENDHAL 



A?i Lnstoiied Celebrity — Biogi and Bonaparte — 
Philosopher and Artist — Biogi and the Military Art 
— The Corsicans Affection for him — Poisons and 
Antidotes — The Battle-Jicld of Rivoli — Berthier and 
Bonaparte — Biogi dislikes Army Men — Bonaparte as 
Connoisseur — Gros and the Areola Picture — Biogi' s 
Description of the Corsican — M. de Chateaubriand 
— The Ficointe and the First Consul — A Mutual 
Antipathy — Le Genie du Christianisme — Essentially 
anti-Catholic — Chateaubriand' s Egotism — The Little 
Man and the Big Quarry — The Vicomte is dismissed 
— His Colossal Vanity — His Obsession as to Napoleon 
— Some Expressions of Opinion — '' Napoleon and My- 
self — Beyle, alias Stendhal — His Literary Pedigree 
— The Individualistic Touch — His Connection with 
Napoleon — Stendhal's Idolatry — His Impartiality — 
France and the Empire — Napoleon s Dead-heads — 
Stendhal and the ex-Eynpress Eugenie — An Author s 
Discretion — Stendhal, Megalomanaic — Napoleon s 
Trust in him — An Imperial Present — The "Soul" of 
the Imperial Army — Stupid Officialdom — Napoleon, 
France's Greatest Man — His Best Achievement — ''The 
Great Emperor" — A Change of Temper — A Literary 
Man's Philosophy — Napoleon diminishes — A Final 
Recantation — " Napoleon was our only Religion" 



WHAT the painter Biogi achieved as 
an artist we are unfortunately unable 
to say, since our researches, in many 
biographical dictionaries of his own and 
later times, tell us nothing either of his professional 
status or even of his ever having passed across 
the crowded stage of the Napoleonic drama. To 
Stendhal we owe it that this young landscape 
painter, a Frenchman by birth and an Italian by 
origin, has been rescued from complete oblivion 
and given an honourable place in the annals of 
the Corsican. The picture drawn by Stendhal 
of Biogi's association with the soldier is, in our 
opinion, one of the most pleasing we have met with 
in our quest for details concerning the art-circle of 
Napoleon, and the youthful artist's independence 
of mind and character in his attitude towards the 
Conqueror, as well as towards the temptations 
which the latter so persistently held out to him 
for his personal advancement, must be admitted 
to be singular, as shown by a member of a brother- 
hood which is not remarkable for its indifference 
either to the spectacular life, or to its possibilities. 
It was during the operations on the Mincio, 
in the early Italian campaign, that Bonaparte 
and Biogi met for the first time. The successful 
soldier, already surrounded by a crowd of syco- 
phants and intriguing self-seekers, was at once 
attracted towards his youthful countryman by 
the strange trait of philosophic indifference with 
which the latter watched, unmoved and detached, 
the imposing drama even at that period beginning 

254 



THE MILITARY CAREER 255 

to unfold itself round the figure of the Corsican. 
Biogi's work had, moreover, the advantage of 
making an especial appeal to the as yet uncor- 
rupted taste of the triumphant warrior — namely, 
. in that it was untouched by what Napoleon himself 
termed the gasconisme common to artists of the 
time, whose tendency was to exaggerate the actual 
beauty and effect of all the scenes and portraits 
which they committed to canvas. Failing to 
induce the artist to throw in his lot with him as a 
military man, and although he had added a promise 
to look carefully after his promotion, Bonaparte 
sought to attach Biogi permanently to his suite 
in the capacity of official painter. To both 
offers the young Frenchman answered very 
candidly : 

" General, I am far from blaming men who 
adopt the military profession which, in its own 
way, may doubtless be both noble and useful. 
To me, however, it makes no sympathetic appeal, 
and I am of those who look upon it as a coarse 
and inhuman trade which never fails to show men 
in their worst aspects. Not all the glory of all the 
conquerors that ever lived could induce me to 
devote myself to a military career." 

To the offer that Biogi should become the official 
pictorial chronicler of the brilliant Italian cam- 
paign, which Bonaparte made to him on the 
morrow of Rivoli, the painter replied : 

" Sir, on entering on my profession I took 
the resolve never to allow myself to work except 
under such inspirations as came directly from my 



256 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIAND-STENDHAL 

own heart and mind, and I feel that the battle- 
field is the least likely of all scenes to move my 
brush to endeavour into which I can throw either 
my heart or my mind." 

Biogi, it appears, was hardly less attracted 
towards Napoleon than the latter to himself. 
He it was who once counselled the young General 
to undergo a kind of regular regime with a view 
to preparing his constitution against the possibility 
of being poisoned, by taking antidotes and so 
preserving his Hfe for the benefit of the RepubUc. 
Berthier, says Stendhal, on this occasion made 
a sign to the young artist suggesting that Bona- 
parte did not care for that kind of conversation. 
To the surprise of the Chief of Staff, however, 
Napoleon took up the subject and treated his 
table company to the philosophy he held in regard 
to this matter. 

" There are poisons, doubtless," said the young 
Corsican, according to Stendhal, " but is there 
a remedy against them ? If Medicine were a 
real and an exact science, would it not, in the case 
of sickness, recommend repose as the best thing 
for one ? But can there be any repose for a man 
of my character and disposition ? Suppose, for 
example, I was to forget my duty so far as to 
hand over the command of the army to one of my 
generals, and go to Milan or Nice, I should be 
entirely unable, at that distance from my troops, 
to judge of the real effects of one or more battles. 
My blood would in that case be in far worse con- 
dition than if I remained here where I could deal 



BONAPARTE'S RESERVE 257 

directly with the actual situation. No ; a general 
in supreme command must take all the risks 
attached to his position, which in their way are not 
dissimilar from the risks that are imposed on the 
commonest grenadier. Besides, if I lost my self- 
respect, I should have lost everything, and death 
itself would be far preferable to reaching that 
stage." 

It was after this somewhat vague discourse 
that Bonaparte sought again to move the young 
artist to paint the battle-field of RivoH. Biogi 
again objected and insisted that his forte lay in 
landscape work. The Corsican would not be 
denied, however, and finally Biogi — who in order 
to facilitate his work was provided with an escort 
by Berthier — consented to paint the scene of one 
of Bonaparte's earliest masterpieces of the art 
of war. In regard to Berthier, Biogi tells that 
he appeared to act as nothing more than Bona- 
parte's chief clerk, that he was never consulted 
but always given orders, and that this, in the 
majority of cases, was the Corsican 's attitude 
towards his subordinates even at that early stage 
in his career. For his own part, the young artist 
declared that, Bonaparte and the common soldiery 
excepted, he had no liking at all for the officers, 
high or low, of the Army of Italy. 

" I was surprised," Biogi is reported by Stendhal 
as saying, " at the distant attitude of the General 
commanding towards even his most distinguished 
lieutenants. To have exchanged a word with him 
was sufficient to make the conversation of a mess- 



258 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIAND-STENDHAL 

table for a whole evening. So you may imagine 
with what envy I was regarded by other men. 
But I suppose," he adds wisely, " the General 
would have entirely changed his disposition to- 
wards me once I had put on the uniform he wished 
me to wear." 

Biogi was not singular among the connoisseurs 
in thinking rather meanly of Napoleon's know- 
ledge of art matters. 

" The General-in-Chief had good enough in- 
stincts," he admits, " but had no training what- 
soever in regard to technique or the various 
schools. He used, for instance, to confuse the 
works of Hannibal Carracci with those of 
Michel- Angelo." 

At that date, we learn with interest, Gros was 
executing his noted picture of Bonaparte rushing 
across the bridge of Areola with a regimental flag 
in hand. Of this painter Biogi said : 

" Gros is the only artist who has courage 
enough to reproduce the pauvretes — an artist's 
expression — which in those days characterised 
the young Conqueror who had the appearance of 
a man already far gone in consumption. Only 
Bonaparte's superhuman physical activity showed 
at that period the iron constitution of the soldier. 
His glance had in it something astonishing : it 
was at once fixed and penetrating, but possessed 
nothing whatever of poetic or lofty inspiration. 
His look changed to one of great tenderness when- 
ever he spoke to a woman, or whenever they 
recounted to him some heroic action on the part 



M. LE VICOMTE 259 

of a soldier of his Army. On the whole, he was 
a being apart from all other men. None of his 
generals in any way bore the least resemblance 
to him. Lemarrois had a charming face, was 
kindly, and excellent company ; distinguished 
though he was, however, he always looked like 
an inferior being beside his general-in-chief. 
Murat looked splendid on horseback, but there 
was an inherent coarseness in his beauty. Duphot 
looked the man of intellect. Lannes, alone, at 
times reminded one of the mighty Corsican. 

" Bonaparte was ever the object of a profound 
and almost devotional respect ; he was a man 
without peer, and everyone who entered his pres- 
ence felt this at once. The women of Verona 
almost fought to get a sight of him at the palace 
of the Venetian Ambassador — a very impressive 
individual, this functionary, who, for all his 
pompous figure, looked like a schoolboy in the 
presence of young Bonaparte." 



Chateaubriand, it will be remembered, was 
acting as secretary at the Legation in Rome in 
1803, a position which the First Consul had given 
him shortly after the appearance of Atala, a work 
which had — very deservedly, we think — ^won for 
its author an immediate renown. Bonaparte's 
object in conferring office upon this representative 
of the vieille roche was a twofold one, inasmuch 
as the soldier assured himself at once possession 



260 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIANEMSTENDHAL 

of the talents of a first-class writer, as well as of 
the services of a member of the order which alone 
was able to perform the duties about a Court, 
as he himself declared. Accordingly Chateau- 
briand, when his new-found fame had made him 
an object of flattering attention in Paris, received 
his invitation to the Tuileries and was presented 
to the master. Evidently the distinguished pair 
were very much disappointed in each other, as 
Talleyrand might have put it, for a kind of 
metallic antipathy — if one may use such an 
expression — rendered their first rencontre any- 
thing but a cordial one, and apparently the 
twain declared war at sight. Thereafter the 
author went to Consular Court but rarely, and 
on only one of these occasions was distinguished 
by a word from the forbidding Corsican, who, 
with the object possibly of removing an un- 
pleasing person from Paris, sent Chateaubriand 
to Rome. The writer, then in poor circum- 
stances, readily acquiesced in a promotion which 
guaranteed him sufficient means of indulging the 
only sporting taste he possessed — namely, the 
pursuit of Love. 

The Vicomte, it would seem, was one of the 
many very vain spirits of that age who affected 
to see in the overwhelming glory of Napoleon a 
force which rivalled and precluded any possible 
fame for themselves ! From the first day of their 
meeting, says Maurice Dreyfous, the author of the 
Genie du Christianisme pretended that Bonaparte 
was jealous of his success ; and to the very end, 



A REAL MASTERPIECE 261 

adds the same authority, Chateaubriand was 
obsessed with the idea that posterity would con- 
sider himself and the Corsican as co-rivals in 
renown ! The religious element in France of that 
time — Catholic, where not Rationalist, of course 
— had set great store by the work we have just 
mentioned, though for what reason we ourselves 
fail to see, since the central idea of the Genie 
tended to show that Catholicity made its appeal 
almost wholly to the sensual instinct in its ad- 
herents — that is to say, that the Roman Church 
depended for its religious and proselytising 
triumphs in the main on the essentially artistic 
methods with which it clothed its ritual, and 
on the sentimentalism with which it inspired its 
teachings — a point of view which no person of 
intelligence can fail to observe on perusing that 
very much overrated production. Atala, no 
competent judge will be found to deny, was a 
genuine masterpiece, and, had he written nothing 
else, Chateaubriand might have rightly based his 
claim to the recognition of posterity on the merits 
of that work alone. But to say that he imagined, 
as Dreyfous asserts he did, that " his fame 
entitled him to consider Napoleon an obstruction 
in the way of his claims," is to overlook altogether 
the fact that Chateaubriand belonged to a clique 
of ideologues who perfectly appreciated all the 
kudos that was to be derived from attacking 
so high-placed and successful a personage as 
Napoleon — a procede connu, as we remember to 
have said in another case, which has never in 



262 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIAND-STENDHAL 

any age escaped the watchfulness of the little 
man in search of the big opportunity. 

While acting as Secretary at the Legation in 
Rome, his social importance gained him the 
acquaintance of several persons who belonged to 
the circle of correspondents of Madame de Stael — 
at that time engaged, as we have seen, in intrigues 
the object of which was the defeat of the First 
Consul's plans for establishing the Empire. As 
easily susceptible to feminine influence, as 
Bonaparte was indifferent to and unassailable by 
it, Chateaubriand entered eagerly into the con- 
spiracy which sought to thwart Bonapartian 
interests throughout Italy. Napoleon's emis- 
saries were not long in discovering the political 
dispositions of the author-secretary at the 
Legation, and accordingly the Vicomte soon 
became a marked man. Realising that he was 
watched by Fouche's spies, he took advantage 
of Napoleon's fateful blunder in executing the 
Due d'Enghien, 20th March 1804, and sent in 
his resignation, which, it would seem, had only 
anticipated his own dismissal by some hours. 
After a few years' travel he returned to Paris, 
where he founded the still-surviving Mercure in 
1806 — a publication which proved itself a source 
far more of irritation than of fear to the Emperor, 
who, we feel very certain, had no illusions what- 
ever as to the quality of the patriotism which 
moved this hyper-emotional artist to oppose his 
methods of governing France. 

In the famous posthumous Memoirs there is 



AN ARTIST'S OBSESSION 263 

to be found a very comprehensive series of the 
Vicomte's expressions of opinion about the great 
Napoleon, and the close student will not fail to 
note Chateaubriand's total inability to consider 
the Corsican as apart from himself and his affected 
anti-Napoleonism, or rather his anti-Napoleon 
propaganda ; for Chateaubriand opposed Napoleon 
far more than he opposed his policy, as indeed 
also did Madame de Stael, Constant and a host of 
others of the great self-advertising circle of opposi- 
tion, as Napoleon must have fully realised. In 
truth, had the Emperor condescended to receive 
into his intimate entourage those opponents of 
himself who achieved both fame and capital from 
their affected hostility to him, there would not 
have been found, we feel convinced, a single in- 
dividual in the long list of his enemies who would 
not have sold himself body and soul to the master 
of Continental Europe. Here are a few of the 
published statements which indicate very clearly 
Chateaubriand's obsession regarding what he 
considered to be his rivalry with Napoleon : 
" He made the world tremble — but never m^." 
" He saw kings in awe of him — but not m^." 
" My Genie du Christianisme had acted on 
Napoleon. ..." 

" The murder of the Due d'Enghien changed 
my life. It also changed Napoleon's." 

" Napoleon may have done away with Kings. 
He has not done away with m^." 

On one occasion he hears that the Emperor — 
too great not to be a fair-minded man when valid 



264 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIAND-STENDHAL 

argument was advanced against him — has uttered 
a favourable view of certain opinions expressed 
in De Bonaparte et les Bourbons ; whereupon 
Chateaubriand writes : 

" Napoleon would make no peace with Kings ; 
he sought, however, to make peace with me."" ^ 

And again : " We were both sons of the sea — 
Napoleon and myself, and I have entered into his 
spirit far more intimately than those who have 
lived at his side " — a claim which certainly did 
not die with the Napoleonic era. 



If anyone were to impose on us the task of 
tracing the literary descent of Henri Beyle, alias 
Stendhal, we should have no difficulty whatever 
in ascribing his intellectual origin to the declara- 
tion of Luther. And we should argue that the 
revolt which rent the system of reasoned — and 
in some degree philanthropic — obscurantism 
followed by the Church of Rome, and introduced 
the notion of self-sufficing Protestantism, in- 
evitably brought in its train a school of philo- 
sophic partisans who made their direct appeal 
to the spiritual or intellectual pride of men. The 
scientific rationalism of the Encyclopaedists was 
one of the first effects of the great Lutheran cause 
in France ; the revival of Letters in Germany, 
which eventually reached its height with Goethe 
— and finally degenerated into Nietzschism — was 

^ Mimoh'es d^Outre-To7nbe. 



MONSIEUR DE STENDHAL 265 

another of the great movements towards enUghten- 
ment which were, in the main, a revolt against 
clericaHsm and clerical influences ; Rousseau, 
Voltaire, Goethe, Byron — these were the greater 
spirits that inspired writers like Stendhal, and 
later the apostle of the Superman, and having in 
mind the lengths to which, in its modern develop- 
ment, especially in Germany, ultra-individualistic 
theories have carried the world, we cannot but 
uncover before the prophetic spirit of Napoleon, 
who said of Rousseau that history would show 
whether it had not been better for mankind if 
such a man had never existed. 

Stendhal owed his association with the Corsican 
to the fact that he was connected with the family 
of Daru, an able servant of Napoleon, who pro- 
cured him an official position in the financial 
department of the government under the Empire. 
He had been present as a member of the com- 
missarial suite at the battle of Marengo at the 
age of seventeen, and enlisted subsequently in a 
dragoon regiment, rather, as he admits himself, 
because of his ambition to be able afterwards to 
say that he had served in the legions of the 
Emperor, than from any love of a military career. 
Beyle, who subsequently adopted the nom de 
guerre of Stendhal, assuming ultimately, as Cam 
Hobhouse tells us with some suggestion of 
ridicule, the title of Comte de Stendhal, was in 
his earliest manhood a fervent admirer of Napoleon 
and all that the Corsican stood for. So fervent 
an admirer, indeed, of the mighty conqueror's 



266 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIAND-STENDHAL 

method of imposing himself and his ideas upon the 
world, that the heroes of the two works which 
keep Stendhal's memory alive are made, on 
setting out upon their worldly careers, to adopt 
a philosophy of life which is based wholly on an 
absence either of moral scruple or of altruistic 
sentiment. Even in 1837, at the age of fifty- 
four, when a man's emotions, we presume, are 
governed by his self-criticism, Stendhal could 
write of the idol of his earlier days that only one 
man had up till then won his entire respect, and 
that man — Napoleon. 

What Stendhal has to say concerning the dis- 
position of the people towards Napoleon and his 
new-founded Empire in 1804 is of considerable 
interest, in view of the claims of the Bonapartist 
faction that the new Emperor was acclaimed 
throughout France with an absolute unanimity. 
According to his version, Napoleon's popularity 
with the masses remained very much in question 
until after the battle of Austerlitz. Up till the 
banishment of Moreau in 1804, the victor of 
Hohenlinden, he says, easily disputed the affec- 
tions of the people of France with the Corsican, 
and it was the consciousness of this fact which had 
moved Bonaparte to exile his great soldier rival. 
Even after the official announcement — 18th May 
1804 — that the First Consul was to assume the 
Imperial title, a large section of the people of 
Paris was unfavourable to Bonaparte's ambition. 
On 12th July of the same year, Stendhal tells, 
the Emperor-elect attended one of the first 



THE EMPRESS EUGENIE 267 

representations of Les Bardes, of which work we 
have spoken elsewhere. A full house at the Opera 
meant, he goes on, receipts amounting as a rule 
to 12,000 francs. That evening, although the 
theatre was completely filled, the management 
took only 6000 francs at the box offices, which 
went to prove (says Stendhal) that Bonaparte 
himself had " bought " the house. He was 
received with great acclamation on this occasion, 
be it noted. On the day following, the Emperor 
visited the Comedie Frangaise, where Iphigenia 
was being staged, and his presence passed entirely 
unnoticed. Stendhal is also authority for the 
statement that even on his coronation day few 
were found to acclaim the Emperor and Empress 
with any cordiality as they passed through the 
streets of their capital. All of which goes, we think, 
to show that Stendhal's impartiality was quite 
independent of his admiration for the Corsican. 

His direct relations with Napoleon began in 
180T, some months after the entry of the Emperor 
into Berlin as a result of Jena, and Stendhal wrote 
a description of that event thirty years later to a 
young Spanish lady, then but a child, a Sefiorita 
Eugenie Guzman y Palafox, whom the present 
world knows as the ex-Empress of the French. 
We are given very little information, however, 
as to the nature of his labours with Napoleon — so 
little, indeed, that his enemies often declared 
the co-operation of the soldier and the author to 
have been a fantasy of the latter's bright imagina- 
tion. Stendhal himself declared that his silence 



268 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIAND-STENDHAL 

on the point arose from his resolve not to com- 
promise himself by telling all he might have told. 
There is no doubt, however, that Napoleon en- 
trusted him once with the duty of levying a five- 
million war indemnity on Brunswick, and the 
author-financier proved his good will towards 
the Imperial patron by raising seven millions. He 
claimed also — perhaps with the facile mendacious- 
ness of the megalomaniac who has once entered 
the presence — to have participated in the negotia- 
tions which led to the alliance between Napoleon 
and the Archduchess Marie Louise. Extant 
documents make, however, no mention of his name 
in this important connection. Nevertheless his 
name is on the list of accepted courtiers, and 
like the first-class temperamentalist he is, Stendhal 
omits no opportunity of informing us of the fact : 
he is presented to Marie Louise by the Duchesse 
de Montebello and is a constant attendant at 
the Imperial receptions. Napoleon charged him, 
during the tragic retreat from Moscow, with the 
provisioning of several army corps, and entrusted 
him, about the same time, with a sum of three 
million roubles (£300,000) for " a particular 
service." The nature of this service Stendhal does 
not state, though we think ourselves that the 
money was probably to be conveyed to Madame 
Walewska — ^in those days Napoleon's most trusted 
friend and the mother of two sons by him — as 
a provision against the difficult times which, we 
correctly suppose, the mathematical mind of the 
Corsican then very clearly foresaw. 



" SOUL OF AN ARMY " 269 

Stendhal gives us, from his own intimate 
experience, an account of the " soul " of the 
Napoleonic military system which we do not 
remember to have read elsewhere, and which 
can hardly fail to prove interesting in these days 
of martial gest. As one who had served in the 
Grand Army, who had powerful connections, and 
who might well have aspired to high promotion, 
Stendhal, nevertheless, confessed himself entirely 
disgusted with the ''intimate souls" {interieurs 
d'dmes) of the military men he had met with 
and whom he describes as " dull-witted sword- 
trailers." No man saw more of Imperial 
officialdom than himself, and no man was more 
sensible of the " insolence and essential depend- 
ency and stupidity of Napoleon's servants " — 
the real agents of the fall of the Empire, as he 
declared. Nevertheless, he holds, Napoleon is 
the greatest man whom France has produced, 
and a tithe of the glory the Corsican achieved will 
suffice, he is certain, to discount whatever of 
iniquity his system disclosed. The imperishable 
glory of the Napoleonic legend is, he writes, the 
enduring heritage of the people of France who, 
as a result of the Imperial wars, have learned 
that a personal cachet has impressed itself for 
all time on the very name of Frenchman. And if 
a patriotic unity in the face of hostile nations 
has discovered itself in France, it is Napoleon's 
achievement which has called it forth. He up- 
braids the Emperor for his weakness on the 
days succeeding Waterloo, when he should (says 



270 BIOGI-CHATEAUBRIAND-STENDHAL 

Stendhal) have declared himself Dictator. For 
all his senseless ambition, however, posterity will 
tell for all time the tale of the great Emperor, 
and his enemies will succeed in interweaving their 
names in his august legend solely because they 
had been his enemies. 

But, alas for Stendhal's emotionalism. With 
the vaingloriousness so common to the artistic 
Hterary man, Stendhal declares in 1816 : " / fell 
with Napoleon," and goes on to show that the 
condition of his private fortune justifies him 
in revising his somewhat ecstatic devotion for 
the fallen Corsican. Primo panem, deinde philo- 
sophari is a sound literary man's motto, and 
towards the end of the year 1817 Stendhal, 
forced to a realisation of its truth, begins to 
contemplate Napoleon from the point of view 
of a Bourbonist in search of office. Under this 
venal analysis Napoleon shrivels to the propor- 
tions of a rather ordinary greatness : It was 
the littleness of his contemporaries which really 
contributed to the glory of Napoleon. Had other 
countries had their Hannibals and their Scipios 
and their Caesars, things would have gone far 
differently. He was a badly educated man, was 
Napoleon^Stendhal now thinks ; he really was 
ever an aristocrat at heart and his founding of 
the Legion of Honour should have proved to 
France the real character of the hero of 1800. 
Above all, Napoleon feared the priests — a 
characteristic born of his elementally Latin 
nature. Even as a politician he showed little 



'' NAPOLEON OUR RELIGION " 271 

talent when the support of the sword was want- 
ing, and honest investigation showed that the 
Corsican had destroyed the sentiment of Uberty 
in France. The explanation of all of which 
becomes clearer when we discover that a few 
months after penning the above opinions, 
Stendhal seeks to show that his loyalty to 
the Bourbons had never faltered during the 
" absence " of Louis XVIII. between March and 
June, 1815. 

The final recantation was to come, as we might 
indeed expect from so emotional a character ; 
and Stendhal touched a deeper truth than he 
himself probably suspected when he contributed 
his final explanation of the Corsican and his 
hypnotic influence on that heroic age, in the 
sentence : 

" Napoleon was our only religion." 



CHAPTER XVI 
IMPERIAL OFFICIAL THEATRE 



One of Napoleon s Chief Ambitions — Instructions to 
Champagny — Authors and their Rights — Assurance 
of Remuneration — Where Napoleon failed — Imjjerial 
Art mediocre — Limitations of Patronage — Genius 
discovers itself — Always its own Patron — Imjierial 
Epoch unfavouirihle to Art — Some Liberal Awards — 
Tragedy, not Comedy — The Thedtre-Frangais — Decree 
of Moscow — Napoleon a Real Benefactor — Schools of 
Dramatic Art — His Liberality to the Histrions — 
The Dresden Bill — His Practical Patronage — His 
Friends among the Illuminati — Did he like Artists ? — 
Rejnarks by Remusat — After Marengo — A Line frojyi 
Cinna — The Murder of Enghien 



HENRY LECOMTE, in his Napoleon et 
le Monde Dramatique, relates how the 
Emperor once declared to Champagny 
that one of his chief ambitions as a 
sovereign was to be able to reward the composer 
of a really great tragedy. 

" You, Champagny," said the Corsican, " are 
head of the literary establishment of the Empire. 
Literature needs encouragement, and I charge 
you with the duty of finding out and suggesting 
to me all possible ways and means of discovering 
a literary genius who shall do honour to my 
reign." 

With this object in mind, he made it one of the 
first cares of his regime to take under his especial 
protection the rights of authors and composers in 
regard to their literary and musical works. 

" If such a thing as property reall}^ exists," said 
the Emperor, " it must surely lie in the ideas and 
inventions issuing from the brain of artists and 
literary men. For what property can be more 
personal or more intimate ? " 

Accordingly, it was decreed that every dramatic 
or operatic work should be subsidised from official 
appropriations — apart from royalties arising from 
representation — for every separate occasion on 
which it was staged, the minimum official award 
being £12 a night for every staging for the first 
twenty nights, and £8 up to the fortieth, when 
an especial bonus of, at the lowest, £20, was paid 
to the author. If any particular piece did not, 
of its enacting, occupy a normal evening on the 

274 



GENIUS ITS OWN PATRON 275 

stage, and if supplementa in the way of ballet or 
concert were found to be necessary, a reduction 
of about one-third was effected on the author's 
official reward, the bonus after the fortieth night 
remaining, however, in all cases. The authors 
were thus positively assured of receiving a sub- 
stantial enough remuneration for their intellectual 
labours, and were furthermore protected against 
unscrupulous theatrical managers. All these 
promulgations dated from 1802. 

For all his wilHng encouragement, however, 
Napoleon cannot be said to have nearly approached 
the success attending on the official patronage of 
Louis XIV. or Louis XV., and Laugier, a French 
writer, voices the opinion of the majority of the 
connaisseurs, we think, when he declares that the 
French drama during the Empire, like all the 
other Arts of the same period, was entirely lacking 
in anything like a superior cachet. Great men, 
he says, with truth, may found great institutions, 
but they cannot endow others with the genius 
that Nature has withheld ; obj ective or interested 
inspiration invariably ceases at the threshold of 
the atelier or the study, and all the prodigahty of 
Napoleon towards those artistic spirits whom he 
thought likely, through their productions, to add 
resplendency to the glory of his reign resulted only 
in a very obvious mediocrity. Supreme artistic 
ability discovers itself, as a rule, long before the 
patronage which venally seeks to exploit it, and 
Napoleon's good will and inspiration were no more 
equal to the forcing of a mind like that of Corneille 



276 IMPERIAL OFFICIAL THEATRE 

than they were capable of creating a Rembrandt 
or a Murillo. And so the most glorious reign in 
the long history of France was unable to show 
one single masterpiece for its existence. 

The French writer goes on to account for this 
failure on other grounds : a vast society had, he 
says, to be reconstructed from the ruins of the 
Revolution, and the generation which had en- 
gaged in one long Homeric conflict with Europe 
in arms was unlikely to father an era of supreme 
artists, a race of beings who are born of peace 
rather than of war. Again, ambitious men of 
the age sought the fruition of their aspirations in 
the Imperial armies, in the Imperial judiciary, in 
the State's councils, and the fine arts attracted 
only minds of second-class rating — an inevitable 
result of all militaristic autocracies, as Confeder- 
ated Germany has, we think, more than proved 
in our own time. 

In 1804 Napoleon officially announced prizes 
of 10,000 and 5000 francs respectively for a 
tragedy and a comedy, the excellence of which 
should satisfy an official Imperial jury appointed 
to make the awards. Raynouard was successful 
in obtaining the prize of 10,000 francs for ■ his 
tragedy, Les Templiers, while the award for 
comedy was not made, the reason given for with- 
holding this burse being that although the 
comedies showed sufficient talent, the Emperor 
wished above all things to encourage Tragedy — 
in the vain hope, we easily divine, of unearthing 
some Corneille who should add lustre to the name 



LE TH^ATRE-FRANgAIS 277 

of Napoleon and his Age. Despite the fact that 
the official jury advised the encouragement of 
Comedy, on the ground that the comic play- 
wrights were much farther behind Moliere than 
the tragedians were behind Racine and Voltaire, 
the supreme authority at the Tuileries declined 
to alter his decision, and so Comedy went un- 
rewarded and unencouraged. 

The famous Imperial Decree that gave to the 
Theatre-Frangais the perfect organisation which 
governs that institution to this day, was dictated 
from Moscow, 16th October 1812. This act of 
Napoleon, says Laugier, in effect, is one of the 
imperishable and constructive benefits with which 
the great Emperor endowed modern France, to 
the rebuilding and permanent moulding of which 
he so largely contributed. By an earlier decree of 
January, 1803, he had given the French Theatre 
its commercial or practical organisation. The 
Decree of Moscow definitely, and probably for all 
time, fixed its administrative constitution. And, 
adds Laugier, if the Imperial epoch was poor in 
dramatic literature produced during the reign, it 
is equally certain that it has never been excelled 
in respect of the technical art of the official ex- 
ponents of the French Theatre. What execution ! 
What perfection in the interpretation of our im- 
mortal masterpieces ! Moreover, it is to the last- 
ing merit of Napoleon that while he assembled the 
greatest galaxy of dramatic actors and actresses 
that France has yet known, he also provided for 
future generations by founding schools of dramatic 



278 IMPERIAL OFFICIAL THEATRE 

art which now form part and parcel of Europe's 
most artistic nation. 

On the occasion of the journey to Erfurt, 
Napoleon distributed some £1500 among the half- 
dozen actors who went thither with him. When 
a similar excursion was made to Dresden by the 
Comedie Frangaise, in 1813, a much larger sum 
was expended in rewarding the artists for their 
services. Monsieur Laugier gives the items in 



connection wi 


tn tnat VIS 


jit, as toilows . 




Desprez 


6,000 frs. 


Barbier . 


3,000 frs 


Saint-Prix 


6,000 „ 


Mile Thenard . 


4,000 „ 


Talma 


8,000 „ 


Mile Contat 


6,000 „ 


Mile George 


8,000 „ 


Mile Mezeray 


4,000 „ 


Fleury 


. 10,000 „ 


Mile Mars 


10,000 „ 


Saint-Fal . 


6,000 „ 


Mile Bourgoin 


6,000 ,, 


Michot 


4,000 „ 


M. Maignien 


2,000 ,, 


Baptiste . 


6,000 ,, 


Brothers Frecho 


t 1,500 „ 


Arm and 


6,000 ,, 


Colson 


500 „ 


Thenard . 


4,000 ,, 


Comb re 


500 „ 


Vigny 


6,000 ,, 


Bouillon . 


500 „ 


Michelot . 


4,000 ,, 


Mongellas 


500 „ 



The Emperor insisted on his family and the high 
functionaries of the State maintaining their loges 
at the first theatre in his capital. For his own 
box he paid 21,000 francs, or £840 ; Queen 
Hortense, his step-daughter, paid £145 for hers ; 
Berthier, £340 ; Talleyrand, £360 ; King Joseph, 
£420 ; Prince Lucien, £310 ; Madame Recamier, 
£280 ; Bernadotte, £150. 

According to Monsieur Lecomte, the Emperor 
was accustomed to receive his favourite artists at 




Fliocoi^'rap/i : Ajiaersoji 



DAEDALUS AND ICARUS 
By Canova 



SOME ARTIST-VISITORS 279 

the Tuileries during first-breakfast, or about nine 
o'clock, this hour corresponding — in his case, as a 
working sovereign — to the levee of the old French 
monarchs. Rarely did this meal exceed fifteen 
minutes in duration, though when exceptionally 
interesting visitors presented themselves, Napoleon 
would graciously surrender his precious time to 
illuminati like Monge, Bertholet, Costaz, Denon, 
Corvisart, David, Gerard, Isabey, Talma, Fon- 
taine and others, saying, as was his custom : 

" Gentlemen, my cabinet is closed for the time 
being. Let us talk." 

And the Emperor invariably talked more than 
anyone else. 

Lecomte affects to believe that the Corsican 
entertained sentiments of good will for the artistic 
brotherhood, a point of view which we have dealt 
with elsewhere, and disproved, we think. Once, 
according to this authority, he accused Monsieur 
de Lugay, an eminent official of his palace, with 
having slighted some of the actors who had 
business with him. 

"Do you know," he is alleged to have told the 
forbidding Lu9ay, " a talent, no matter what its 
nature, is a veritable power in the world, and I 
make a point, myself, of never omitting to salute 
Talma when I meet him." 

Monsieur de Remusat, who is responsible for 
this detail, takes care to add that Napoleon, in 
making the remark, meant not the least word of 
it. The Emperor was, says the Comte, kind and 
cordial towards artists of all kinds who showed an 



280 IMPERIAL OFFICIAL THEATRE 

unquestioning devotion to himself and his ways of 
thinking — who, en somme, allowed themselves to 
be taught, and who never contradicted him. It 
was only, concludes Monsieur de Remusat, when 
he became a great personage, that Napoleon 
forced himself to take an interest in matters which 
up till that time had given him no concern what- 
ever. Even as regards Talma, it always seemed 
to close observers that he felt the actor's renown 
rather than his artistic greatness. 

"At all periods of his life," insists Lecomte, 
notwithstanding the scepticism of M. de Remusat, 
" Napoleon displayed a profound interest in 
everything connected with actors and acting." 
On the day after the battle of Marengo, he recalls, 
the First Consul spent an hour walking up and 
down a small vineyard surrounding his military 
headquarters. An aide-de-camp approached with 
a dispatch, and Bonaparte, awakened as from a 
deep reverie, astounded the officer with a long 
quotation from La Mort de Pompee : 

" J'ai servi, coramande, vaincu quarante annees, 
Du monde entre mes mains j'ai vu les destinees ; 
Et j'ai toujours connu qu'en tout evenement 
Le destin des Etats dependait d'un moment." 

On the fateful night of 20th March 1804, when 
he decides to sign the order for the murder of the 
Due d'Enghien, he is heard to whisper the words 
spoken by Augustus, in Cinna : 

" Soyons amis, Cinna, c'est moi que t'en convie ..." 



L'AIGLON 281 

And on the same tragical eve, the lines from 
Alzire : 

" Des dieux que nous servons, connais la difference : 
Les tiens font command^ le meurtre et la vengeance ; 
Et le mien quand ton bras vient de m'assassiner, 
M'ordonne de te plaindre et de te pardonner." 

After the battle of La Rothi^re, during the cam- 
paign of France, in 1814, he writes to his brother 
Joseph : 

" I should prefer to see my son strangled than 
to think of him being brought up in Vienna in 
the midst of my enemies. ... I have never yet 
witnessed Andromache without pitying the fate 
of Astyanax, whom I always thought happy in 
not surviving his father." 



CHAPTER XVII 
CONCLUSION 

Kircheisens Bibliography of Napoleon — One Book 
ivanting — The Temperamental Aspect of Bonaparte 
— The " Napoleon " Test of Nationality — A Modern 
Imitator — The Imperishable Corsican 



A SENSE of decency compels us to admit 
that any man who produces a Napoleon 
book, in these days, owes it to the public 
to explain the fact, and we willingly give 
our own reasons for the present performance — all 
the more so, indeed, because we have fully read 
and fairly digested our Kircheisen, and know what 
that voluminous bibliographer of the Napoleoniad 
has to say about the Grand Library of books 
and publications which deal with the Emperor and 
his coruscating legend. Here, in effect, is what 
Kircheisen will tell the inquirer in those two 
plump tomes which any wight may wade through 
with much instruction to himself : 

(1) The number of individual books which record 
the story of Napoleon and his Age must now be 
counted by the tens of hundreds. 

(2) Separate magazine and newspaper articles, 
born of the same heroic inspiration, have been 
written and pubHshed in their tens of thousands. 

(3) If all the publishers' archives and the 
editorial and contributors' files of all the peri- 
odicals of all the nations could be assembled and 
given shelf -room, it would be found that Napoleon 
already plays a capital role in at least two hundred 
thousand books, ecrits divers, reviews, turnovers, 
special articles and sundry other papers which 
have been committed to breathing type, at one time 
or another, by professional or amateur scribes. 

It is clear from all this, therefore, that the writer 
is under some obligation to explain the reason of 
the present book : 

284 



THE ETERNAL CORSICAN 285 

A few years back an old fellow-student, writing 
from India, asked us to verify some expressions 
of opinion by Napoleon on literary and art matters, 
in respect of which our exile in Hindustan had no 
reference books at hand. In order to obtain the 
required opinions it was found necessary to con- 
sult some score of books in the Reading-Room of 
the British Museum. The idea then " developed," 
as they say in America, that a separate book 
might excusably be put together treating of the 
temperamental side of Napoleon, as indicated 
by the great soldier's heredity, his education, his 
reading, his literary, dramatic and art leanings, 
and his religion. Such a book in anything like 
complete form had not in English — nor indeed 
in French, German or Italian — as yet come into 
being. The facts might certainly be found in a 
large library of volumes, by well-known writers, 
dealing with the Eternal Corsican ; but not with 
any completeness in any single volume which the 
writer has yet succeeded in discovering. 

Master-students of Napoleon, hke Mr Holland 
Rose, the Earl of Rosebery and Monsieur A. 
Guillois have — all serious readers are aware — 
thrown much light on the mind and character of 
the immense Man of Destiny, by touching on such 
intimate personal details, in works which have 
now become classics. These works were not, 
however, devoted specifically to a presentment 
of Napoleon considered almost wholly from his 
temperamental aspect. Our own endeavour has 
been to trace the mighty Corsican from this point 



286 CONCLUSION 

of consideration, and in one brief volume, by 
dealing with his superabounding chronicle in a 
series of chapters which have treated 

(1) of his genealogy ; 

(2) of his early schooling ; 

(8) of his particular reading as a student and 
his general reading as a man ; 

(4) of his tastes in drama and music ; 

(5) of his associations with men and women 
connected with the theatre ; 

(6) of his predilections in painting and sculpture ; 

(7) of his literary bent and his connections and 
dealings with literary personages ; 

(8) of his understanding, or rather misunder- 
standing, of the functions of that important 
half -art which we call journalism ; 

(9) and, finally, of his religious beliefs — which 
last, we are permanently satisfied, were based 
solely on political expediency and were really 
atheistic. 

A study of all these conditions, it may reason- 
ably be supposed, must add something to the 
explanation of a personality which has proved 
itself at once one of the simplest and one of the 
most complex in the list of the world's great men. 

We are a long way from classing ourselves 
among the detractors of the mighty Corsican, as is 
the fashion nowadays among many who derive 
their conceptions of Napoleon, his personality and 
his ceiivre, from handbooks, or from romances 
which present Bonaparte as a central figure. We 
hold that if a conscious Providence exists, Napoleon 



THE NAPOLEON BIAS 287 

was assuredly an instrument of its will. At the 
same time we are equally far from thinking that 
he can be classed among the great spirits of the 
world, and we have arrived at the opinion that 
the student of history, in classifying the over- 
whelming personalities of the ages, will find him- 
self forced to discriminate between great spirits 
and great men of action. A Lincoln, a Gladstone 
— here assuredly great spirits. A Napoleon, a 
Bismarck — arch-pragmatists, if ever. No ; the 
spirit of pure philanthropy is altogether wanting 
in these. 

Certainly, too, we have long since reached the con- 
viction that Napoleon could never have imposed 
himself and his reclame on any race of Anglo-Saxon 
men — or even on a sane Germany — in any modern 
age, in any political circumstance, or with all his 
achievements multiplied by ten, in the same way 
as he succeeded in imposing his iron personality 
on a temperamental race whose greater spirits 
had gone under in that bloody Revolution which 
made his career a possibility. Indeed we have 
found by experience that the bias in favour of, or 
against Napoleon provides a satisfactory enough 
test of a man's nationality and character — whether 
he be a true Anglo-Saxon, a true Kelt, a true 
Latin, a true Teuton, and of the type of rigid aiid 
self-disciplined men who — to adapt Goethe — will 
drink no foreign wine. 

And yet, for all the sordid materialism that 
underlies the epic of Napoleon, it must be 
conceded that it remains one of the moving 



288 CONCLUSION 

inspirations of all time. That great age of lustred 
exploit and adventure was, when the worst is said, 
inspired and led by one the supremacy of whose 
heroic mind was clear and incontestable as the 
limpid logic of its action and effect. And when 
in these days we contemplate the halting and 
convulsive performance of the puny histrion who 
would fain play the role of world-conqueror, 
vainly seeking to impress itself and its foul 
mission upon the mocking hemispheres, then, in 
truth, we of the unconquered Islands may well 
admit, with reverence of mind, if not of heart, 
the vast measure of our most formidable foe, the 
mighty Corsican — so wise in word and counsel, so 
sound in thought and project, and in act so 
swift, so unerring, so magical — Napoleon ! 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Following is a list of works which were either read or con- 
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1848. 
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London. 1906. 
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T 289 



290 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

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Fleischmann : Une Maitresse . . . Paris. 1908. 

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Hardenberg : Denkwiirdigkeiten. Leipzig. 1877. 
Johnston : The Corsican. London. 1910. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 291 

KiRCHEiSEN (F.) : Gesprache Napoleons des Ersten. Stutt- 
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KiRCHEiSEN (G.) : Die Frauen und Napoleon. Munich and 
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Lacretelle : Analogies et Contrastes . . . Paris. 1837. 

Lecomte : Napoleon et le Monde dramatique. Paris. 1912. 

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LuMBRoso : Napoleone — La sua Corte. . . . Rome. 191 1. 

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Las Cases : Memorial. Paris. 1862. 

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Martel : Memoires et CEuvres de Napoleon. Paris. 1910. 

Maze-Sencier : Les Foumisseurs . . . Paris. 1893. 

Mass ON : Napoleon inconnu. Paris. 1895. 

Masson : Livre du Sacre. Paris. 1908. 

Masson : Napoleon dans sa Jeunesse. Paris. 1907. 

Masson : Napoleon et les Femmes. Paris. 1906. 

Masson : Huit Conferences. Paris. 1909. 

Maricourt : Napoleon dans sa Vie intime. Paris. 1862. 

Mi^LiA : Les Idees de Stendhal. Paris. 1910. 

Meneval : Napoleon et Marie Louise. Paris. 1843. 

Meneval : Memoires pour servir . . . Paris. 1894. 

Macaggi : Napoleon, Part IL Paris. 1895. 

Marquiset : Napoleon stenographic. . . . Paris. 1913. 

MouRAViT : Napoleon bibliophile. Paris. 1905. 

MULLER : Erinnerungen. Braunschweig. 1851. 

Napoleon : Precis des Guerres de Frederic. Paris. 1872 

Napoleon : Precis des Guerres de Turenne. Paris. 1872. 

Napoleon : Precis des Guerres de Cesar. Paris. 1836. 

Napoleon : Correspondence with Joseph. London. 1855. 

Niox : Napoleon et les Invalides. Paris. 1911. 

O'Meara : A Voice from St Helena. London. 1822. 

Panckoucke : CEuvres de Napoleon Bonaparte (Genealogy, 
Vol. I.). Paris. 1822. 

Petetin : Commentaires de Napoleon L Paris. 1867. 

Pelet : Napoleon in Council. Edinburgh. 1837. 



292 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Peyre : Napoleon et son Temps. Paris. 1888. 

PiNGAUD : Bemadotte . . . Paris. 1901. 

Pacca : Memoirs. London. 1850. 

Randot : Napoleon peint par lui-meme. Paris. 1865. 

Remusat : Mtooires. Paris. 1880. 

Remusat : Lettres, 1804-1815. Paris. 1881. 

RoccA : Le Nid de I'Aigle. Paris. 1905. 

Rose (J. H.) : Life of Napoleon. London. 1913. 

Rose (J. H.) : Personality of Napoleon. London. 1912. 

Rose (J. H.), Napoleonic Studies. London. 1906. 

RosEBERY (Lord) : Napoleon : The Last Phase. London. 

1904. 
Rosen (Lew.) : Napoleon's Opera-Glass. London. 1897. 
Sainte-Beuve : Chateaubriand. . . Paris. 1834. 
Skalkowski : Concernant la Pologne, 1805-1815. Warsaw. 

1911. 
Sklower : Entrevue de Napoleon I. et de Goethe. Lille. 

1853. 
Stourm : Les Finances du Consulat. Paris. 1902. 
Stendhal : Vie de Napoleon. Paris. 1876. 
SoREL : Bonaparte et Hoche. Paris. 1896. 
Talleyrand : Memoirs. Paris. 1891. 
Thibaudeau : Histoire de la France . . . Paris. 1834. 
Thi^bault : Mtooires. Paris. 1893. 
TuRQUAN : Napoleon amoureux. Paris. 1897. 
TscHUDi : La Mere de Napoleon. Lausanne. 1910. 
" Un Croyant " : Paroles Imperiales. Paris. 1848. 
ViNOT : Notice historique sur . . . Brienne. Paris. 1888. 
Vachi^e : Napoleon en Campagne. Paris. 1913. 
ViLLEMAiN : Souvenirs contemporains. Paris. 1854. 
Welschinger : La Censure sous le Premier Empire. Paris. 

1882. 
Welschinger : Le Pape et I'Empereur Napoleon. Paris. 

1905. 
Wairy : Mtooires de Constant, premier valet . . . Paris. 
1830. 



INDEX 



Accent, Napoleon's bad, 55 

Account of Corsica, 56 

Acta Diurna, 227 

Acton, Lord, 19 

Mneid, Books I., II., VI., 51 

^sop, work of, 51 

Agamemnon, 82 

Aim6 -Martin, M., 237 

Ajaccio, 2?) et seq. 

Alcibiades, 162 

Alexander I., Emperor, 10 1 passim 

Alexander VI., Pope, 173 

Alexander the Great, 41 

Allemagiie, De I', 247 

Ambition, Napoleon and, 47 

Ami des Lois, V , 223 

Antichambre, 1', 71 

Apollonius of Tyana, 57 

Arc de Triomphe, 136 

Architects, Napoleon dislikes, 134 

Aristotle, 32 

Arnault, dramatist, 68, 81 

Artaud, M., diplomat, 164 

Art collection, Napoleon's, 138, 139, 

140 
Artists' fees, 134 
Atala, 259, 261 
Athalie, tragedy, 112 
Auerstadt, 44 
Augereau, Marshal, 235 
Aune, L6on, 42 
Austerlitz, 43 
Auxonne, garrison town, 54, 55 

B 

Baciocchi, Signor, 29 
Baour-Lormian, 68 
Barrow, historian, 54 
Bardre, 220 

Beyle, H. (Stendhal), 264 et seq. 
Benckendorff, Count, 10 1 
Belliim Cimhricum. 116 
Berthier, Marshal, 118 passim 
Beethoven, 182 

293 



Beugnot, orator, 228 
Bernadotte, Marshal, 241 
Beauterne, ChevaUer de, 193 
Berton, R. P., 53 
Beaconsfield (Disraeli), 45 
Bible, Napoleon's, 59 
Biogi, artist, 254 et seq. 
Bonaparte p^re, 27 passim 
Bozzi, Signor, 30 
Bozzi, family of, 38 
Bossuet, 52 ' 
Boileau, 52 
Boswell, James, 56 
Bourgoin, Mademoiselle, 83 
Bourrienne, de, 115 passim 
Bonaparte Crossing the Alps, 146 
Borghese Marbles, 167 
Bonaparte et les Bourbons, 228 
Brienne, school of, 50 
Brutus (Voltaire), 66 
Britannicus , 78 
Brizzi, tenor, 181 
Brumaire, Day of, 219 
Brunswick, Duke of, 246 
Brigadier Girard (A. Conan Doyle), 

250 
Buona Parte, 33 
Buonaparte, Francis, 34 
Buonaparte, Gabriel, 
Buonaparte, Ludovico (Moro), 34 
Buonaparte, Jerome (1579), 34 
Buonaparte, Augustus, 35 
Buonaparte, Sebastian, 37 
Buonaparte, Joseph (1660), 38 
Buonaparte, Sebastian Nicholas, 38 
Buonaparte, Nicolo, 68 
Bufifon, 54 

Bulletin de Paris, 220 
Byron, Lord, 265 passim 



Cacault, diplomat, 159 
Carthaginians in Corsica, 24 
Capulets and Montagues, 27 
Calonne, M. de. 



294 



INDEX 



Caesars, Byzantine, 33 
Caesars, Roman, 33 
Castracani, Castruccio, 33 
Caesar, Julius, 41 
Caesar, works of, 51 
Camoens, work of, 51 
Canova, 158 et seq. 
Campo-Formio, 159 
Catholicity and Art, 172 
Catechism, the Imperial, 209 et seq. 
Caprara, Cardinal, 215 et seq. 
C6sar, coachman, 91 
Charlemagne and Corsica, 23 
Charles VI., Emperor, 26 
Churchill, family of, 32 
Charles XII., 43 
Chateau, R. P.. 53 
Choiseul, Due de, 70 
Chaptal, Minister, 83 
Chameroi, Mademoiselle, 85 
Chantilly, chateau de, 133 
Chatsworth House, 165 
Chaband, Monsieur, 237, 238 
Christ, Napoleon on, 196 
Chateaubriand, 259 et seq. 
Chuquet, biographer, 52, 56 
Cicero, works of, 51 
Cinna, 93 

Claudius, Emperor, 124 
Cluny, chateau de, 133 
Cimarosa, 183 
Corsica, 20 et seq. 
Corsican Vendette, 22 
Colonna gens, 30, 33 
Conde, 42 

Cornelius Nepos, 51 
Corneille, 18, 51, 62 et seq. 
Contrat Social, le, 55 
Constant, Benjamin, 2^7 fft seq. 
Constant, body servant, 82 passim 
Com6die Fran9aise, 100 passim 
Corregio : Saint Jerdme, 138 
Coronation of Napoleon, 151 et seq. 
Consalvi, Cardinal, 160 
Correspondance , 180 
Courrier de f Avmie, 231 
Commons, House of, 195 
Crescentini, tenor, 181 
Cromwell, Oliver, 32 
Cumberland, Duke of, 43 

D 

Daedalus and Icarus, 138 
Davout, Marshal, 44 



Daru, official, 109 

Dazincourt, M., 112 

David, Imperial painter, 142 et seq. 

David, J. L. I., biographer, 146 

Denou, an intellectual, 58 

Decr6s, official, 130 

Deists and God, 192 

Delphine, 241 

De I'Allemagne, 247 

De Viris (Nepos), 31 

De la L.ittirature, 240 

Diodorus Siculus, 25 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 45 

Dion Cassius, 124 

Dow, artist, 138 

Drost, Baron, 27 

Douglas, Marquis of, 135 

Dreyfous, Maurice, 260 

Duval, Alex., 70 

Dupaty, dramatist, 71 

Duroc, Earl Marshal, 76 

Durer, A,, 138 

Duphot, General, 239 



EcKERMANN, Secretary, 107, 108 
Education, Napoleon on, 206 
Elisa Bonaparte, $6 
En Corse (Merim6e), 29 
Encyclopaedists, 264 
Enghien, Due d', 113, 201, 223, 262 
Erasmus, works of, 51 
Erfurt, Congress of, 108 et seq. 
Eroica, symphony, 182 
Esprit des Lois, 53 
Etruscans in Corsica, 24 
Eutropius, 31 



F 



FtN^LON, Archbishop, 52 
Fesch, Cardinal, 197 
Fiev6e, editor, 220 et seq. 
F16chier, 32 
Fleet, the (prison), 27 
Fleury, director, 91 
Fontanes, M. de, 117 
Fontenelle, 18 
Fouch6 (Otranto), 219 et seq. 
Frederick II., of Prussia, 43 
Freemasonry, 37 
Friedland, battle of, 116 



INDEX 



295 



Gautier, critic, 237 

Gazette de France, la, 2 iS 

Georgics, Fourth Book of the, 51 

G6nin, R. P., 53 

Genoa, 20 

George, Mademoiselle, 88 et seq. 

Genres traytchis, iig 

Gepp, Professor, 209 

Genlis, Madame de, 220 

Ginie dit Christianisme, 226, 260 

" Georges Sand," 242 

G6rard, painter, 137 passim 

Gibbon, historian, 59 

Goethe, J. W. von, 32, 106 et seq. 

Gourgaud, Baron, 41 passim 

Gobelins, les, 136 

Greeks in Corsica, 24 

Grandmaison, poet, 81 

Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) , 203 

Grotthus, F. von, 247 

Gros, painter, 137 passim 

Grassini, la, 161 et seq. 

Guelphs and Ghibellines, 27 

Gustavus Adolphus, 43 

Guzman, Mademoiselle (Empress 

Eugenie), 267 
Guizot, historian, 226 



Jacobin Press, the, 239 

Janfeld, podestd, 33 

Janin, Jules, 10 1 

Jena, battle of, 44 

Jerome Bonaparte, 10 1 passim 

Jewry and Napoleon, 57 

Joseph Bonaparte, 55 passim 

Josephine, Empress, 161 passim 

Journalism, Napoleon and, 218 cf 

seq. 
Journal des Ddbats, 218 et seq. 
Journal de Paris, 218 
Journal Univefsel, le, 230 
Julian House, the, 32 
Junot, General, 46 
Julius II,, Pope, 173 



K 



King of Rome, the, 206 
Knights of Malta, 52 
Korsakoff, General, 45 
Kotzebue, patriot, 114 



H 

Habsburg, House of, 32 
Hamlet, Napoleon sees, 63 
Hannibal, 41 
Hector, a tragedy, 69 
Hennequin, artist, 134 
Henri IV., 41 
Hinard, Damas, 42 
Hobhouse, Cam, 265 
Hoche, General, 44 
Hohenlinden, battle of, 45 
Homer, 51 passim 
Horace, works of, 51 



I 



Iberians in Corsica, 24 

Iliad, the, 72 

Institut de France, 122 

Invalides, Les, 133, 145 

Iphigenia, 89 

Isabey : Malmaison picture, 147 

Italian Campaign, 1796, 43 passim 



La Bruy^re, 20, 51 

Lawyer, the Corsican, 35 

La Villetta, estate, 37 

La F^re, Battery XII. of, 58 

Lannes, Marshal, 62, 109 passim 

La Vedova, play, 68 

La Fontaine, 73 

Las Cases, Memoirs, 80 

Lansdowne House, 164 

La Rochefoucauld, de, 243 

Les Templiers, 64, 65 

Les Bar des, opera, 184 

Lemercier, poet, 81 

Lessing, 114 

Le Moniteur, 109 passim 

Lefivre, Robert, 138 

Lebrun, 150 

Leo X., Pope, 173 

Lesueur, composer, 184 

Lemarrois, General, 259 

Ligurians in Corsica, 24 

Livy, Book XXL, 51 

Library, Napoleon's, 59 

I>ockhart, historian, 19 



296 



INDEX 



Louis Bonaparte, 56 passim 
Louis XI., 41 
Louis XIV., 41 
Louis XVI., 21, 31 
Louis XVIII,, 165 
Lunegiana, canton, 20 
Luther, Martin, 32 
Lucca, dictator of, 33 
Lucian, work of, 51 
Lucien Bonaparte, 56 passim 
Luce de Lancival, 69 
Lyons, Academy of, 57 



M 



Mably, historian, 54 
Marius, dictator, 32 
Marlborough, Duke of, 32, 42 
Mala Parte, 33 
Macedon, House of, 33 
Marceau, General, 44 
Marengo, battle of, 45 
Massena, Marshal, 45 
Manasseh, tribe of, 45 
Massillon, 52 
Marigny, historian, 54 
Macbeth, Napoleon sees, 63 
Machiavelli, 54 passim 
Maret, Minister, 109 
Mahomet (Voltaire), 115 passim 
Marly, chateau de, 133 
Marie Louise, 166 ei seq. 
Masson, Frederic, 170 passim 
Marcus Aurelius, 174 
Marchesi, tenor, 185 
Manning, Cardinal, 190 
Macaulay, Lord, 192, 220 
Merim6e, P. de, 29 
Memoirs of de Grammont, 39 
Medici Venus, 138 
Meneval, M. de, 181 
M6hul, composer, 180 
Meaux, Bishop of (Bossuet), 210 
Mercure de France, 225 
Mivope (Voltaire), 83 
Milton, 51 

Military School, Paris, 53 
Mirabeau, M. de, 54 
Mincio, operations on the, 254 
Moreau, General, 45 
Mouravit, G., 50 
Montesquieu, Baron de, 55 
Molidre, his place, 64 passim 
Montmorency, de, 243 



Murat, Joachim, 97 passim 
MuUer, Chancellor, 107 
Miiller, Johann von, 116 passim 
Music and Politics, 180 



N 



Nansouty, M. de, 120 

Napoleon: the Last Phase (Rose- 

bery), 18 
" Napoleon," variously spelled, 28 
Napoleon III., 193, 201 
Narbonne, M. de, 232 
Newman, Cardinal, 19, 190 
New Blood, a theory, 31 
Neuhof. Theodore, 26 
Ney, Marshal, 46 passim 
Neo -Christian notions, 191 
Necker, banker, 238 
Norvins, M. de, 199 



Opinions of Napoleon, 42 
Oratory, three styles of, 51 
Organic Articles, the, 209 
Ornano, Jacopo, 26 
Ornano, Signor, 30 
Orsini, family of, 33 
Ossian, songs of, 56 
Othello, Napoleon sees, 63 
Otranto (Fouch6), 219 et seq. 
Ouvrard, army contractor, 10 1 



Paer, Monsieur, 183 et seq. 

Paisiello, composer, 182 

Pale, the Corsican, 35 

Paoli, 27 

Paravisino (Paravicini), 20 

Pauline Bonaparte, 153 passim 

Petrus Cyrnoeus, 21 

Phaedrus, Fables of, 51 

Pietra-Santa, 20 

Pius VII., Pope, 160 passim 

Plato's Republic, 54 

" Politics and Fate," 66 

Pont des Arts, Paris, 133 



INDEX 



297 



Pozzo di Borgo, 22, 35 
Portalis, M. de, 209 
Priests and politics, 173 
Prudh'on, 137 
Publiciste, le, 223 



Racine, 51 passim 
Ramolini family, 20 
Ramolini, Letitia, 27 
Rape of Sabine Women, 143, 144 
Rationalism, scientific, 264 
Rawdon Crawley, 198 
Raynouard, playwright, 65 
Razel, writer, 24 
Regnault, painter, 151 
Reichstadt, Duke of, 59 
Reinhardt, Graf von, no 
Rembrandt, 138 
Religion and Art, 172 
Remusat, Madame de, 41 passim 
Remusat, Monsieur de, 41 passim 
Richard III. of England, 34 
Rigel, pianist, 80 
Rivoli, battle of, 255, 257 
Rivoli, dukedom of, 45 
Roederer, official, 47 
Rocquain, Felix, 219 
Rocca, Monsieur de, 249 
Rossini, composer, 182 
Rostopchin, M., 248 
Rousseau, j. J., 53 passim 
Roustan, mameluke, 91, 97 
Royalist Press, 239 
Rubens, P. P., 138 
Rudolph of Habsburg, 32 



Sidonia, 45 

" Sixidme latine," 50 

Solus : a degree, 62 

Souper de Beaucaire, 58 

" Soul of Militarism," 269 

St Helena, 41 passim 

Stagira, 32 

Stael, Augustus de, 244 

Stael, Madame de, 234 et seq. 

Stein, Baron, 248 

Strabo on Corsica, 25 

Suard. Monsieur, 117, 223, 224 

Suetonius, 124 



Tacitus, 121 et seq. 

Talma, 67, 76 et seq. 

Talleyrand, 62 

Tartnffe (Molidre), 64 

Tasso, work of, 51 

Tilimaque, 120 

T6niers, David, 138 

The Wolf and the Lamb, 73 

Theocritus, work of, 51 

Thiebault, historian, 46 

Thiers: coronation sketch, 148, 149, 

200 
Thirty Years' War, 43 
Titus, Emperor, 174 
Tott, Baron, 54 
Toumai, See of, 197 
Trajan, Emperor, 174 
Treviso, records of, 21 
Troy, Siege of, 71 
Turenne. 4.2 
TusoU, Maria, 38 
Tuscany, Grand Duke of, 138 



Saint Martin, Abbey, 133 
Sallust, works of, 51 
Sapieha, Prince, 89, 92 
Saracens in Corsica, 25 
Saxe, Marshal, 43 
Schiller, 114 
Schlegel, author, 242 
Seneca on Corsica, 21 
S6gur, de, family, 243 
Shakespeare, 62, 63, 73 passim 
Shaw, Lifeguardsman, 42 
Sidyes, Abb6, 237 



VfeLY, historian, 73 
Venice, oligarchic, 175 
Venus and Adonis, 159 
Verona, 27 
Vertot, Abb6, 52 
Vignon, 131 
Villa Buonaparte, 28 
Villemain, Monsieur de, 232 
Villoteau, singer, 81 
Volnais, actress, 91 
Voltaire, 51 passim 



298 



INDEX 



w 

Wagram, battle of, 42 
Walewska, Madame, 268 
Walpole, Horace, 27 
Waterloo, 42 passim 
Waverley, author of, 31 
Wellesley, family of, 32 
Wellington, Duke of, 32, 187 
Werth»r, Sorrows of, 62 



Wieland, 114 et seq. 
Wurmser, Marshal, 43 
Wurtemburg, Prince of, 26 



ZiNGARELLI, SigUOr, 1 84 

Zola ; Rome, 169 
Zurich, battle of, 45 



